REWahoo
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give
Here is another interesting example of how modern science and big pharma have created moral and ethical nightmares. I'm hoping this story is an exaggeration of how clinical trials are conducted.
Two cousins are diagnosed with skin cancer....
A question for all you docs on the forum - is this story over-dramatized or is this really how the clinical trial process works in the US?
Two cousins are diagnosed with skin cancer....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/health/research/19trial.html?_r=1And when, last year, each learned that a lethal skin cancer called melanoma was spreading rapidly through his body, the young men found themselves with the shared chance of benefiting from a recent medical breakthrough.
Only months before, a new drug had shown that it could safely slow the cancer’s progress in certain patients. Both cousins had the type of tumor almost sure to respond to it. And major cancer centers, including the University of California, Los Angeles, were enrolling patients for the last, crucial test that regulators required to consider approving it for sale.
“Dude, you have to get on these superpills,” Thomas McLaughlin, then 24, whose melanoma was diagnosed first, urged his cousin, Brandon Ryan. Mr. McLaughlin’s tumors had stopped growing after two months of taking the pills.
But when Mr. Ryan, 22, was admitted to the trial in May, he was assigned by a computer lottery to what is known as the control arm. Instead of the pills, he was to get infusions of the chemotherapy drug that has been the notoriously ineffective recourse in treating melanoma for 30 years.
Even if it became clear that the chemotherapy could not hold back the tumors advancing into his lungs, liver and, most painfully, his spine, he would not be allowed to switch, lest it muddy the trial’s results.
A question for all you docs on the forum - is this story over-dramatized or is this really how the clinical trial process works in the US?