BBC News - Cancer drug Avastin loses US approval

The drug-maker says it will undertake further study to establish which patients will benefit from the drug

US drug regulators have rescinded approval of a breast cancer drug, saying it is not effective enough to justify the risks of taking it.

The drug, Avastin, was approved for US use in 2008, but UK officials have also rejected claims that it prolongs life.

Further research showed it did not help patients live longer or improve quality of life, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret Hamburg said.

[...]

Full article at bbc.co.uk

Okay, here's me giving credit where it's due. The American consumer tends to want what it wants when it wants it; it gets a whiff of a rumor about some new drug in development and clamors for the FDA to hurry it through approval, then nags it's doctor 'til it gets a prescription, then vilifies both when they fail or cause (usually documented and reported) side effects, or when the doctor and/or pharmacist say, "Hey, turns out this isn't giving the results the studies led us to believe or hope it would." (Not all consumers, and not just Americans, but on the whole we're probably the most globally-effective society that exhibits as high a percentage of that type of consumer as we do.) And we want medicine to cure everything. It can't yet, it's still learning some pretty basic principles, and when it can (which will be the case someday) we'll have to deal with deciding who's allowed to live and who's allowed to breed, since that will effectively make us immortal and our resources will hit a limit beyond which we simply cannot stretch them. Seems to me it's just someone else to blame when things go wrong, and it also seems like we might get more mileage out of it if we gave medicine it's proper place as a science, limited but eager to improve and expand, rather than the role of God we want it to have when things go wrong (although of course when things go well it's the result of our own positive thinking). Doctors are human, most are doing their best, but every body, literally, is different from every other in at least some way, and medicine will have to get to a point at which it can decode the most basic information the body has to offer and treat each body individually (and it will get there, but again, that leaves us faced with the questions that come with eternal physical life). Medicine moves so fast we can't blame them for not always bein' able to keep up, but we have every reason to expect that if we go to the trouble of doing our own research they'll take the time to help us understand what we've found and make a decision with which we're comfortable, and that if we don't do that research we should be able to count on them to be professional enough to send us to someone more knowledgeable when we're outside their sphere of expertise. Capitalism doesn't lend itself to that kind of morally upright behavior, but humans will eventually change the social contract around what constitutes money and how we use it, and then doctors, nurses, healers, midwives, acupuncturists, herbalists, chiropractors, and all the rest will be able to work together toward making what they all do better. There's a place for medicine in any civilized society, but there always comes a time when we're forced to make choices regarding who, what, why, when, and how we choose to continue supporting a body in life, as well as regarding who gets to make those choices and for whom. The laws around those things now define rights far too narrowly to be practical, and the social dogmas against examining death and it's effects (negative or positive) leave too many people at the end of their time with no clear plan. Frankly, I think the government has no place in choosing what kind of health care someone can get or from whom; I think the health care of one's choosing should be freely available to everyone at all times (we could afford this if 'alternative' or 'traditional' forms of care were covered along with modern medicine and if people didn't suffer from a feeling of needing to utilize insurance because we pay for it) at the highest possible quality, including elective procedures of all kinds. People will choose the practitioners who get the best results whose choices most closely reflect their own, which will create an environment in which each works toward their best potential at all times, and not just those providing the care but their patients as well. That doesn't mean trying to live up to an overarching standard applied equally to all people, but finding a caregiver who's aware of and understands one's choices and works with their client/patient in achieving the best, most effective results within their lifestyle choices, and educating them in the reasons they might want to make changes if there seems to be some concern (then leaving the choice to do so or not with the patient, but having the option to ask the patient to move on if their styles are simply not compatible). So we want the research, we want the cures, but we don't want to accept the consequences of choosing to use them when perhaps there just isn't enough time or money invested to know what we need to know about a thing, so we blame those on medicine. If we choose to go to a doctor, and we choose to take what they prescribe, and we react adversely to it, ultimately it was still our decision. By the same token, if we choose to go and we don't listen, or we choose not to go, we need to be able to accept the consequences (and rewards) of those choices, too. (It occurs to me that legal action in response to any of those choices seems extreme, but that's beside the point.) (Or maybe is the point. It needs to be that a drug is always considered to be in the process of being researched in terms of it's side effects and possible interactions, and that people can opt in and out based upon their decision with their practitioner, and a practitioner that can prescribe pharmaceuticals would need to be highly qualified to do so, so if an herbalist wants to be able to incorporate medical alternatives into his or her practice he or she can get the appropriate ongoing training and do so, and vice versa for medical professionals, many of whom do recognize the power of the natural sources behind most of the chemical versions but who choose to practice in a sphere of refined, standardized options rather than the somewhat more nebulous and in some ways riskier world of purely plant-based meds. The FDA knows that they'll take heat for this, from those who swear by these drugs (and some surely do), from those who actually feel like they don't require adequate research or are corrupt, and from those who just like to yell about stuff. But at least they chose to pull it instead of letting it be a problem. I'm sure the money trail would lead to questionable places or whatever and I'm sure there's some twist by which it's part of a grand conspiracy - everything is on some level, but a conspiracy that grand is probably beyond the scope of my ability to do anything about, really, other than what I'm able in my life and in my personal world - but taken at face value they're just trying to fix a mistake best they can. Hopefully that's the case, it'd be nice. :)

Posted via email from Moments of Awareness