3 ms·
> A patient with a seriously life-threatening disease like lung cancer is perhaps more willing to gamble on a risky drug in pursuit of a cure, while someone wit
by zeveb 11y ago
> A patient with a seriously life-threatening disease like lung cancer is perhaps more willing to gamble on a risky drug in pursuit of a cure, while someone with a disease that has a high survival rate such as diabetes presumably cares more about avoiding adverse side effects.
If he's more willing to gamble, then why not just let him do it? The FDA's job should be to enforce truth-in-labelling (which means drugs with no beneficial use should be labelled as such, and those with horrible side effects should be labelled as such), and patients working in concert with their physicians should determine which drugs to take.
For this to work, we may need to limit the ability of drugs to be advertised. I'm okay with limiting the civil right to free speech of pharmaceutical companies in order to respect the fundamental human right to ingest whatever one wishes of patients.
- refurb 11y agoIf he's more willing to gamble, then why not just let him do it? They already do. It's called expanded access programs. If a patient is going to die, they can ask the FDA for permission to take an unapproved drug. The FDA says yes 99% of the time.
- danieltillett 11y agoYou can only get access to the drug if the company gives it to you. The hard-nosed response of the company is to never say yes since you run the risk of the patient having a side-effect unrelated to your drug that can kill it when you try to get FDA approval. If you care about helping the most people then risking your drug this way is crazy.