When I had leukemia, my first rounds of chemo used cheap drugs. (The drugs were far cheaper than the daily hospitalization costs, which was required due to drugs obliterating the immune system.) The insurance company didn't require any oversight into the process.
But once the chemo stopped working and a much more expensive treatment was needed, the insurance company became quite a pest. I'm fortunate have saved a lot of money, so I didn't delay treatment until insurance approved it. (The 2-3 weeks between treatment starting and the final approval from insurance may have actually made a difference between life-and-death when dealing with aggressive leukemia.)
I actually should have put it differently. Precision medicine will bring new treatments to the standard of care because we will be able to find the correct drug for you or me.
This sounds very similar to participating in a clinical trial and to me ironically seems to be the opposite of precision medicine.
The Nagourney Cancer Institute cultures live cancer cells from the patient to test for what drugs may work. Doesn't work for everyone, but seems more in line with precision. Whereas genomic sequencing hasn't produced the amazing results that were expected.
yes, to be clear this is a description of "standard of care" in which oncologists follow a playbook based on the type of cancer. Precision medicine (as I, a lay person, understand it) involves picking a treatment that is very likely to work based on an individual's genes, the genes of their tumor, their past medical history, and other relevant factors. The idea is to use all available information to identify the treatment that is the most likely to succeed for that individual.
That assumes you have time for this. Very often treatment is started within days or even hours of diagnosis.
Also aggregated death rates will always lag if treatments are improving.
My dad was diagnosed with a very rare type of stomach cancer called GIST at 42. The average survivability at that stage for GIST at that time was 6-12 months. Zero patients lived more than 5 years.
He was given experimental(at the time) drug called Glivec as it was being tested specifically against GIST and it was literally one of these "there's nothing else, so might as well".
He lived another 8 years after that, until cancer came back and the drugs stopped working.
When he was first diagnosed I was a teenager, my sister was a child - thanks to this drug he was able to see his kids go into adulthood, and obviously spend 8 more years with his wife.
How is that "ain't much"??????
Whether four or eight years, either is an enormous gift when facing a terminal illness. There is no question about it. It's even more so the case if a person is 40 years old than if they're 80. The 80 year old has already lived a full life, death is far more acceptable, tolerable, at that age for most people.
I suspect a person would have had to have never seen a loved one confront a terminal illness, to believe a year of additional time isn't a lot given the context.
My mother died relatively young from small cell lung cancer. At the time there were no specific therapies for it, it was often caught late, and typically a person would die within 6-12 months. Almost nobody would make it more than three years. She lived for around 20 months post diagnosis, and that was a lot of very valuable time, even if it wasn't enough time.
I've observed across my lifetime that some people live more in a year than other people manage to in a decade.
How quickly time passes objectively and how we experience time are obviously two different things. Perhaps the skeptical parent was failing to grasp the significance of the difference. When facing a terminal illness, how you experience time is drastically altered, even if the seconds tick by as they did before.
I cannot believe how flippantly you're responding to someone who told the story of their dad passing away due to cancer, and yet you have the gall to also whine about downvotes.
An extra day with your loved ones is paradise. Taking a drug and potentially gaining years?
Come on mate, it's not a surprise you're being downvoted as your attitude is a disgrace.
Even if the absolute death rates for some cancers are relatively unchanged, one of the amazing things I’ve observed is that medical advances have increased the long term survival rates of terminal/metastaticized cancers. It’s partially due to the development of various drugs that have been identified as effective against various specific mutations. Even if the cancer is incurable with existing technology, they can extend lives by years, which is nothing to sneeze at. Especially considering many people get diagnosed with cancer once they are elderly already, it can mean the difference between dying directly of cancer and living long enough to die of something else - ie the cancer becomes something more like a chronic condition than it does a direct threat (for a period of time).