> Regulating non-approved medical treatments out of existence might look appealing, but IMO we need to allow informed, rational people to choose unapproved trea

> Regulating non-approved medical treatments out of existence might look appealing, but IMO we need to allow informed, rational people to choose unapproved treatments where no approved one exists. The difficult part is the word "..informed,...". Without regulation, how can you enforce the research and data collection and sharing needed to estimate the efficacy of the treatment? And without a good estimate of the risks and efficacy, how can you make an informed decision? Granted it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario; you need data before you can make an informed decision, but you need experiments before you can get data. I'm actually pretty comfortable with letting people at the end of their lives try unproven experimental treatments; but we need to ensure that we as a society learn from those experiments so they won't always be unproven and experimental; so the first 100 people taking a treatment know it's a toss-up on results; the next 100 people know there's a 15% chance of improvement/10% chance of death. I fear that without adequate regulation, there would be little incentive to track what worked and what didn't.