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Why are safeguards necessary? They're going to die anyway, letting them try literal snake oil isn't hurting anything. Let people make decisions for their own
by sneak 3y ago
Why are safeguards necessary? They're going to die anyway, letting them try literal snake oil isn't hurting anything.
Let people make decisions for their own bodies.
- hotpotamus 3y ago[flagged]
- avery17 3y agoRequire the treatment be free for the patient. Problem solved.
- RandomLensman 3y agoWho will then pay? Doctors and hospitals eating all the costs doesn't seem likeky. It is not just the drug, but administering it, treating side effects, monitoring etc.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoFor experimental treatments, it's very likely. It happens today in many clinical trials.
- RandomLensman 3y agoYes, as part of trials but for self-selected medication by patients - not sure. The funding sources for trials wouldn't necessarily just extend there.
- mortureb 3y agoThe organization giving the experimental drugs with the view that it will pay for itself in relevant research and treatments that come from the testing.
- RandomLensman 3y agoBut these wouldn't be trials in a useful sense if patients can self-select. The economics might not pan out unless you get to gatekeeping similar to current trials. And that assumes it would be all bona-fide substance providers.
- mortureb 3y agoIt could sure speed up a lot of the preclinical work to get to trials. I’m sure the company would love to not have to extrapolate their success probabilities based on mouse studies leading to extensive expensive trials that might not work out in the end.
- RandomLensman 3y agoDoubt it as people would make very uninformed choices, thereby producing mostly worthless data.
- janpieterz 3y agoFair, but there’s already a lot of medical related alternative treatments and activities that cause people to give up on more established practices and causes real harm. Currently the laws allow for the government to stop a lot of that. I don’t like it, but don’t know a solution that would work, people are extremely vulnerable in these situations.
- influx 3y agoTheir body, their choice. Steve Jobs probably killed himself by his medical choices but that’s what he wanted to do. Should we have strapped him in and forced him to get conventional medicine?
- magicalist 3y ago> Steve Jobs probably killed himself by his medical choices but that’s what he wanted to do. Should we have strapped him in and forced him to get conventional medicine? No, but we could have regulated transparency of "nontraditional medicine" and any fraudulent claims the people he was listening to were making.
- sneak 3y agoWalgreens sells homeopathic products on the shelf right next to real medicine. The NHS and German public health systems pay public money for homeopathic fake remedies. (To their credit the NHS has reduced the practice.)
- astrange 3y agoThis can be effective; a lot of medicines have experimental evidence saying they don't work, because they aren't better than placebo, but the reason for this is that the placebo works too.
- magicalist 3y agoOr they can kill your baby: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/fda-confirms-toxicity-of-homeopathic-baby-products-maker-refuses-to-recall/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/fda-confirms-toxicit...
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- KaiserPro 3y agoI'm going to take this as a naive question and answer it with an example. Andrew Wakefield et al published a paper based on a small number of participants. they effectively preyed upon desperate parents to assert that MMR caused autism. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9500320/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9500320/) When people are desperate, its very easy to get them to do stuff thats very bad for them. The problem is that in some cases that "very bad" thing might actually be quite good. For example adding chlorine to water, on the face of it, is a fucking stupid idea. However along with proper sewage/sanitation, its responsible for most of the extended lifespan we enjoy in the west. It is a grey area between doing good, through taking informed risks, and using shortcuts that require desperate people to take extra ordinary risks. For example the reason why that vaccine was a massive risk is because the immune response could have just attacked the brain tissue as well as the tumour. And as it is a learned immune response, its super hard to stop it.
- sneak 3y agoWe are discussing specifically in the context of people who are less than a year from death anyway. Risks are irrelevant at that point if the person in question wants to try them. All of your examples seem to be irrelevant in that context.
- KaiserPro 3y agowe were talking about desperation and people taking advantage of that desperation. Just because you are terminal doesn't mean that people asking you to risk your life are anymore trustworthy.
- tim333 3y agoWakefield wasn't offering a treatment. He was selling a test kit that may have allowed people to launch lawsuit that they were harmed by vaccines. That's a different category of thing really.
- fzeroracer 3y agoWell, because often said snake oil can be quite toxic to your body and result in a lot of needless suffering. To be honest, most people know that if 'right to try' became a thing it would need to be followed up with 'you waive all rights to a lawsuit' because the moment an experimental treatment resulted in an extremely painful and accelerated death suddenly all of the people being advocates for right to try would sue them out of business. In this scenario, it's a cancer expert well aware that these treatments could possibly result in the above and is willing to do so anyways.
- Johnny555 3y agoWhy are safeguards necessary? They're going to die anyway, letting them try literal snake oil isn't hurting anything. Unless they were so enamored with the snake oil treatment that they ignored a legitimate treatment that have been effective.
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- flir 3y agoIf there's a legitimate effective treatment available, they're no longer terminal cases, are they? I suppose you could hypothesize someone refusing treatment until its too late then trying the snake oil...
- Johnny555 3y agoThis article is about a doctor with incurable cancer who was able to find a experimental treatment that so far seems to be helping. If instead he had been focusing on magic magnetic bracelets with no hope of helping, he may have not have tried this science based treatment.
- flir 3y agoI've thought about this for a couple of days because I thought it deserved serious attention, and I see your point, but a terminally ill patient choosing "the wrong one" between two possible treatment paths when neither of them is likely to work seems like such a corner case that I don't think it should block, or even modify, "right to try" laws. (And on further thought, magnetic bracelets aren't currently banned, so it seems like a bit of a straw man. I can't think of a woo treatment that could potentially be unlocked by a right-to-try law. I think they're all already available - Steve Jobs' certainly was, to take one famous example).
- pc86 3y agoBut it is enriching snake oil salesman, which lets them spend more money to convince people who aren't dying to spend money on their bullshit. Look at the bigger picture - it doesn't matter if it's just this person doing whatever they want with their body if it's a net negative for society as a whole. Society shouldn't accept any externality just because someone thinks cuckoo fraud "science" will work when it won't.