A good friend of mine signed up for a trial as an alternative treatment for her aggressive breast cancer, everyone's hopes went up (trials tend to have that effect on people) but "nothing happened". She passed away 6 months after the trial started without knowing if a placebo was used. It's painful anecdata, but the few people I know that got into cancer studies as an alternative to their regular treatment, none ever had the study knowingly influence their outcome. Yet, in every case, the study was the one-hundred-percent animic lifeboat to grab on to.
Participating in a trial is about helping science just as, or more than, it is about helping yourself.
As an aside, I’ll have to be careful here because I think I might be confusing some of the trials he was a part of with actual treatments he received. It’s been a big mix of throwing a lot of different things at the wall.
Still though, it's a better time to have cancer than ever I suppose.
There was one treatment that they were going to trial my friend on that would give him another expected extension but basically make his digestive tract stop working so he’d be pooping out of a tube into a bag the rest of his life but he declined, said it just wasn’t worth it.
There have been a couple times that’s been the call he’s made and I appreciate why.
Cancer sucks; why it is so hard for us to beat is so frustrating. need more research focused on this.
It's very rare that everyone in the control group dies and everyone in the experimental group survives. Usually the result is mixed.
The problem is that medical doctors sometime make bad guess about how many years the person will survive. That's one of the reason to have a control group, so the error in the guess compensate.
Good luck to him
Within that first year he was put on a trial that added another 2 or so years to his life. Then during that time another experimental treatment was created and tested on him and that gave him another couple of years. A decade and a half later here we are, he still has cancer but his family (wife and two kids) has got to keep him around a while longer.
He’s been “patient one” on a number of studies, some have helped him extend his life expectancy, others have done nothing. Sometimes he has the mental and physical energy to start a trial and other times he does not.
The cancer has never gone away, and there have been so many moments of false hope that I’m never really sure where he sits mentally anymore (he really doesn’t want to talk about cancer when we’re together and I don’t think anyone can blame him) but I know he’s grateful for the chance to add more time onto his life when the experimental treatments are available.