Emergency Medical Studies

Complained 12 years ago one of my friends from the breast cancer support group to court because her health insurance had refused the cost of bone marrow transplantation. Her first transplant was unsuccessful, and her cancer on the rise again. The insurance company refused to cope with it, because it was an experimental treatment. The judge, himself a cancer survivor, was visibly moved as a result of appeals, and my girlfriend got her transplant. Six months later she was dead – not because of the progressive breast cancer, she died as a result of injury caused by the treatment of bone marrow. Then a few months later a second girl died of breast cancer after their transplant and I began to read the studies themselves, and I put together piece by piece, which showed the current studies, in fact – and what they could not prove it. My education about clinical trials had begun, I have described this already in the 2003 published article “From Access to Evidence: The road to patient representation.  It took quite a while and some effort to understand the interplay of forces, which took place on that date with bone marrow transplants and breast cancer in America, too. And, as one hand on the side of the hopes of patients and oncologists and other public pressure, heart-rending media reports of terminally ill young mothers, political and legal obligations of payers, personal reputations of scientists and the profit margins of hospitals with transplant beds, which had to be filled, this led to apply broadly to a toxic and expensive treatment before there was sufficient evidence that this treatment works and is safe.