Comment by dylan604
Comment by dylan604 3 days ago
> what's the worst that can happen?
The patient dies from complications of the drug's use before the cancer.
Comment by dylan604 3 days ago
> what's the worst that can happen?
The patient dies from complications of the drug's use before the cancer.
>If I had 6 months to live, and had no other options, I wouldn't care if a drug killed me in 10 days. Give me the option.
you're not being creative enough.
I agree with compassionate use cases, but be creative here : some drugs can create deaths much more miserable than the controlled burn of a 6 month descent into hospice care surrounded by family and loved ones.
6 months to live versus a possible supportive drug regiment with the side effects being constant pain until you slowly bleed out through your eyes after total sensory lock-in -- easy a choice to make? not for me.
Fine, what if the drug causes a violent psychotic break and you harm your loved ones?
What if some weird interaction sensitizes your nerves, and you spend your last weeks in incredible pain, begging to die? Not only would that suck for you, it would, again, affect your loved ones. It would also cause distress to the nurses that cared for you and the doctor(s) that administered it to you; remember, they don't just have to convince you, they have to convince medical professionals that this wouldn't be violating their code of ethics.
No. No no no.
Big Pharma needs good data. And they have annoying FDAs/whatever-regulations-body slowing them down.
If you have a serious disease they might not mind you taking it. But if you have a serious disease plus your kidneys have already shutdown - w/e drug won’t save you. The death counts as a negative. “Let me take it anyway” well fine but it’s not some huge conspiracy.
It's not just those two choices though. It could be "6 months in relative comfort" and "10 days begging each minute to die but you can't because you're borderline unconscious". Or anything in between. Just saying.
Medical guidelines are there for a reason and are often, as they say in the military, "written in blood".
Having seen the last ten days of pancreatic cancer, there isn’t really a difference with what you’re describing.
Having seen a family member die absolutely horrifically in a matter of weeks due to late-diagnosed pancreatic cancer, I'd consider suicide if I got the same diagnosis.
In a purely rational world who cares. 4 months is not all that far away from 6 months and with cancer you’d probably prefer to not be alive for those last two months anyway. We should be willing to do Hail Marys with 5-10% chances of success rather than doing absolutely nothing.
You would destroy any inheritance your family might get, or which could be donated to a cause saving a dozen lives, over a 5% chance you don’t die from cancer specifically, which might make you feel unbearably bad until you DO die? Like much worse than you already feel? That’s insanely irrational.
Edit: and all of this is before the psychological implications of knowing your time is almost up. People would rather have burnt skin removed by a painful grinder than painless maggots because bugs and being eaten are so psychologically scarring most people won’t even consider it until they experience the pain of the flesh grinder work. People won’t think rationally anyways until it’s much too late.
Sorry what’s the inheritance logic here? Are you talking about life insurance or something? Otherwise, and again presuming the cure doesn’t work which seems absent from your assessment as a possibility, how would it affect someone’s inheritance?
My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.
That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
One problem is people selling their home to pay for snake oil, so their children now are not only orphan but also homeless.
Imagina an evil bank clerk on the door of a cancer center that says:
fake quote> There is a new promising [unverified] treatment that can save the life of your S.O. It's very expensive so you have to take a double mortgage on your home. You are very lucky, because today we are offering it with only a 49.99% interest rate. Do you love him/her?
Okay great point I hadn’t considered - makes the parent comment more sensible. Thanks!
Term life insurance really isn't expensive, and it's meant to take care of those you leave behind in an unfortunate event. Pay off some big bills so your partner isn't grieving AND homeless. Most of the people on this site are pretty well-off, and can/should afford an expense like this.
If you've got a 95% chance of death, take the pain pills and enjoy your final days. Don't bankrupt yourself and spend more time miserable, dying anyways.
I think this might be a US vs international thing then on the value of life insurance (typical payouts here are around $100k, 10% or more are rejected, and that policy would be around $10k a year). But nonetheless it’s the smallest/irrelevant part of my point.
The parent comment suggested taking an experimental drug would mean they couldn’t give their children inheritance, implying that the government might seize your assets or something.
I firmly disagree with the “take the death” argument made here, but I do respect the intellectual integrity of committing to your argument at least, and suspect we just hold extremely different moral perspectives.
Are you sure those numbers are right? People are paying up to $90k to get $100k? Where is this land? I need to open a business here.
In the US, you pay like $350/year (assuming you’re, like, 30-ish?) for about a half million dollar policy.
By the time you’re 60, you shouldn’t need that payout anymore. You should have enough savings to cover your funeral, plus whatever retirement plan you had anyways to care for the probably-just-one dependent at that point.
I feel like you’re imagining that you take a magic drug which cures you and you go home happy. In reality, the drug will have severe side effects in every case, making your final days worse. The chances of it working are already incredibly low. It is a significantly more brutal lottery than scratch tickets could ever hope to be.
When you have almost no time left, you focus on quality. Visit people you haven’t seen enough, do things you wanted to do, say things you meant to say. Take some pain meds to get through the worst of it. Memento mori.
If I had 6 months to live, and had no other options, I wouldn't care if a drug killed me in 10 days. Give me the option.