There has been a lot in the news lately about the federal Right To Try law that has just been enacted, allowing terminally ill patients to try out experimental, unapproved treatments. There seem to be interesting arguments both pro and con regarding it. I couldn’t find a thread about it, but it seems like fodder for a lively debate. What is *your *humble opinion?
No poll; I think the issue is probably too complex for a few simple options.
If you have little to lose, might as well go for it, as long as the surviving relatives don’t get to sue if you die horribly from drug side effects.
I say it’s good, but with possibilities to be bad for the naive segment of the terminal patient group. There are some quacks out there with no qualms about fleecing people with “cures” they know won’t work.
That’s a good point, but also consider this: for a patient to know they have a terminal illness, they must have been diagnosed by a doctor. Hopefully, these doctors will be educated on emerging technologies, and can offer opinions on what is worth a try vs. what is just snake oil.
What about if the treatment cures/retards the initial ailment, but leaves the patient alive with terrible quality of life?
If these type of laws are allowed, then right to die laws should be right alongside. Life at any cost is a nightmare IMO.
With reasonable regulation it sounds fine to me. If you’re going to die soon anyway you ought to have a chance to try extreme measures to survive as long as you are fully informed of any possible complications resulting.
And as stated above, there should be a Right to Die law, it is absurd that in both cases we deny someone the means to possibly or surely end their suffering.
It’s mostly useless. A tiny chance of good. A greater chance of harm. Very little will actually come of it but false hope and a slight weakening of the FDA.
The harm being dying a few months sooner? I could understand people considering false hope vs. no hope.
The harm could be extreme side effects and losing all your money while lessening the enforcement power of the FDA.
Then tough shit. The background of this is that there are experimental drugs still in research that people want to try and the scientists are saying that the drugs aren’t ready to be tested yet and we don’t feel comfortable giving them to you. The law is saying that the patient can insist on trying the drug anyway even though it hasn’t been fully vetted by the scientists. If someone insists on taking something that hasn’t passed the proper trials with full knowledge of that, then the scientists and drug companies should have absolutely zero liability no matter how bad it screws the person up–they went in with both eyes open.
Why should the FDA have enforcement power to prevent you from trying extreme measures to save your life in the first place? And I stated that the patient must be fully informed of the consequences. If they are, and still want to take the chance with *their own life *and their own money then why should you or the state have anything to say about it? This doesn’t allow providers of experimental care to commit fraud either.
The problem to be considered for a poorly written law will be numerous claims to have insurance companies or the public cover the cost of nonsense cures that haven’t even made it through the early phases of FDA approval.
Except the people are not going in with both eyes open. I expect they would be desperate people grasping at straws. Any side effects mentioned will likely be hand-waved away because hope usually overrules sense.
Even with some very strict controls I can see some Tuskegee type experiences cropping up.
Because the point of the FDA is to say what drugs are safe. Saying, “Yeah, but we don’t need certain drugs to be safe if people really want them!” is not a good idea, in my opinion.
The FDA could already give compassionate use waivers, and almost always did. I think their approval rate is upwards of 99%. My understanding, and feel free to correct this if I am wrong, is that the hold up is almost always the drug manufacturer not being willing to participate. This won’t change that.
And most states already had right-to-try laws on the books. I haven’t seen any data that show these laws have helped people.
So, what it looks like is an endaround of the FDA, mostly driven by organizations (mostly one organization) that oppose the existence of the FDA and would like to hamstring it.
It’s need not want at issue here.
Since this already covered by state laws and waivers then there’s no reason to deny a federal law to deal with this. If properly written the law could free drug manufacturers from the liability they fear.
This is a reasonable argument. I don’t know what lobbyist wrote this law but I’m sure it is aimed at weakening the FDA’s legitimate regulatory power. But I don’t consider denying people even the slimmest chance of survival when death is imminent a legitimate regulatory power. I consider it immoral to deny people their right to survive when it causes no harm to others.
IMHO it depends on how these treatments are approached. It’s one thing to allow an experimental treatment that is still in the early research stages that is not yet proven safe. It’s another thing to allow treatments that have been proven ineffective but are still pushed by some quacks, like Laetrile. The latter should not be allowed, even with right to try legislation. I think it should also be limited to treatments that are in the process of being researched by legitimate researchers, again no quacks allowed. There should also be no expectation from patients that their regular physician refer them for such treatments. If a patient wants to try out an unproven treatment, they need to seek it out on their own, not expect that their primary care provider set it up for them.
I don’t think legal liability is generally what pharmaceutical companies are avoiding by refusing to participate in right-to-try requests.
As for the “tough shit” ethos, I don’t want that in my medical system. Apparently, some states have laws on the books that if someone uses a drug through a right-to-try statute, that person forfeits their right to use hospice care or their insurance. But if we have someone who is dying of cancer and they try this new hotness drug and it does nothing, are we going to deny them painkillers? Do we want people not to be able to access hospice care? Helping people get through the dying process as painlessly as possible should be a good thing, not something we sacrifice in the name of false hope.
I recognize that those with a libertarian bent (like the backers of these laws) want to free markets of the infernal constraints of regulation. I don’t see any reason to think this is really for the benefit of patients.
Patients could already seek out drugs that were undergoing trials and ask for access outside of the trial setting. If the provider agrees (usually, this idea would be coming from the provider) then they could ask.
Pharmaceutical companies sometimes would say yes, and sometimes would say no. The FDA claims the approve nearly all requests. If they get a yes from the FDA, the FDA looks at data on the extant trials of the drug or data on similar drugs and gives advice when possible on things like dosages, expected side effects, etc. I read a couple of days ago that most pharmaceutical companies say they do not intend to skip the FDA step because they consider the FDA input too valuable and it includes data the pharma company does not have.
Of course, the current GOP is well-known for their support of (and insistence on) reasonable regulation, right? :dubious: :rolleyes:
The legislation is an attempt to end the FDA’s oversight of these waivers. Just because they normally grant them does not mean the process has no value. They can provide much more information to the provider-patient team than the pharmaceutical company alone.
As for “need” versus “want,” that’s actually a complicated semantic issue. Can we be said to need something that doesn’t work? Or do we want it in the hopes that it will?
If it weakens the FDA, it causes harm to others.
Just out of curiosity, do you feel that pharma should have to supply these drugs? This law does not require that.
I missed this earlier. In later posts, you seem to be suggesting that there can be no reasonable regulation that would keep a drug from someone who is dying if there is the slimmest chance it might work. You said the FDA has no place regulating that. So what would this reasonable regulation look like?