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Living 2.1m longer may not be seen as an advantage if those two months are spent in severe pain trapped in a hospital bed suffering from a wide range of serious
by DanBC 7y ago
Living 2.1m longer may not be seen as an advantage if those two months are spent in severe pain trapped in a hospital bed suffering from a wide range of serious side effects.
We need to talk about death and we need to talk about what people want when they die. A few people do want to struggle and gain every extra day they can no matter how painful that's going to be for them, but that's not what most people want.
- mft_ 7y agoI agree with your sentiment, but that's a bit of a straw man you're building there. The FDA would require that those two extra months usually aren't spent suffering unbearable additional side effects from the treatment, and it would also be fairly uncommon for such patents to be "in severe pain trapped in a hospital bed". In contrast, if you've got (say) three months to live, the prospect of an extra few months with a reasonable quality of life, if probably something many people would take.
- zzzcpan 7y agoI'm pretty sure two months is statistically insignificant in this context to even claim there are two months.
- mft_ 7y agoThat can't be supported, given that the two months in question is only a median from a review (of FDA drug approvals for solid tumors from '02 to '14). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/article-abstract/1891387 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/article-... You'd need to explore the data behind the individual approvals to comment on statistical validity. But without going that deep, you can be assured that the FDA is generally pretty conservative, and employs very robust statistical methodology.
- keanzu 7y agoMore than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, and more than 600,000 died. We don't know how many patients received the 72 drugs approved over a ten year period but we do know the potential customer base for the drugs is massive. Millions of people could have taken the drugs, you could easily get a statistically significant result.
- DanBC 7y ago> The FDA would require that those two extra months usually aren't spent suffering unbearable additional side effects from the treatment, I can't speak about FDA, but I can speak about NICE and the Cancer Drugs Fund. NICE was set up to look at the cost effectiveness of medications and treatments. They were refusing to recommend new cancer drugs. This was politically tricky, so the Cancer Drugs Fund was set up to provide novel meds. We spent over £1bn on it, and most of the drugs provided no meaningful benefit and caused harm. https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2097 https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2097