3 ms·

That depends a lot on the quality of the treatment. If it is a good treatment with some risks, that makes sense. However, if you don't enforce any minimum quali

by vog 12y ago

That depends a lot on the quality of the treatment. If it is a good treatment with some risks, that makes sense. However, if you don't enforce any minimum quality for the treatment, this is nothing more than misusing the patient's situation for scientific experiments. Rephrased with some exaggeration: "Our patient will die anyway, so let's run the experiments. Maybe one of our experiments is successful. If not, who cares?" I believe the main dissent here is whether to think of this as a medical treatment with minor risks, or as an experiment done on defenseless victims.

mikeash 12y ago
It's not exactly "who cares?" but more like, "it's unfortunate, but they were dying and we tried something that gave them a better chance of survival." It's experimental, but they also have good reason to believe that it works. Now it's being tested in a scenario where it's likely to save lives. I can understand the objections overall. But in this particular case, where it's being used as a last-ditch effort to save people who otherwise are almost certain to die, seems pretty reasonable. How else are medical researchers to advance the state of the art in emergency care? I assume that we don't want to just take what we have now and set it in stone forever, but I don't see any other way to validate new procedures.
reversal 12y ago
I believe this is a case for Dr. Jay Freireich who was considered a barbarian and labeled as a pariah in the medical community because he gave out experimental treatments on childhood leukemia patients who had no chance of survival outside of a few months. Mind you this treatment is literally poisoning the patient and hoping the cancer dies while the patient still has a thread of life remaining. There was also a very good chance that the chemicals would end up doing the job the cancer was already doing. He was able to save very few of his patients from the same end, as well as developing what would become modern chemotherapy that's saving countless more cancer patients today. So a better question is: is the situation we're presented with so grim that we're willing to use a method that's just as deadly as the disease/injury but has a glimmer of hope for survival?

by vog 12y ago

mikeash 12y ago

It's not exactly "who cares?" but more like, "it's unfortunate, but they were dying and we tried something that gave them a better chance of survival." It's experimental, but they also have good reason to believe that it works. Now it's being tested in a scenario where it's likely to save lives. I can understand the objections overall. But in this particular case, where it's being used as a last-ditch effort to save people who otherwise are almost certain to die, seems pretty reasonable. How else are medical researchers to advance the state of the art in emergency care? I assume that we don't want to just take what we have now and set it in stone forever, but I don't see any other way to validate new procedures.

reversal 12y ago

I believe this is a case for Dr. Jay Freireich who was considered a barbarian and labeled as a pariah in the medical community because he gave out experimental treatments on childhood leukemia patients who had no chance of survival outside of a few months. Mind you this treatment is literally poisoning the patient and hoping the cancer dies while the patient still has a thread of life remaining. There was also a very good chance that the chemicals would end up doing the job the cancer was already doing. He was able to save very few of his patients from the same end, as well as developing what would become modern chemotherapy that's saving countless more cancer patients today. So a better question is: is the situation we're presented with so grim that we're willing to use a method that's just as deadly as the disease/injury but has a glimmer of hope for survival?