Miracle Drugs

[xoxoxoBruce]

Miracle Drugs, a much overused expression. But if you need them to fix you up, I guess they are a miracle. But it seems if you need cancer drugs, it may take a miracle to get them.

“Our results indicate that the vast majority of oncologists in the country are facing wrenching decisions about how to allocate lifesaving drugs when there aren’t enough to go around,” Gogineni says. “The potential impact of these drug shortages is vast: they’re putting patients at risk and driving up costs of cancer care.”

In addition to quantifying the prevalence of cancer drug shortages, the authors also identified a variety of ways in which oncologists say they’ve adapted when preferred or recommended drugs are scarce:
•78 percent of oncologists reported treating patients with a different drug or drug regimen
•77 percent substituted different drugs partway through therapy
•43 percent had to delay their patients’ treatment
•37 percent had to choose among patients who needed a particular drug
•29 percent omitted doses and 20 percent reduced doses
•17 percent referred patients to another practice

So far, little is known about how these adaptations may impact clinical outcomes, but the authors say the widespread treatment delays reported underscores the urgency of the problem. The most risky types of modifications, Gogineni says, occur when physicians substitute drugs partway through patients’ treatments, since there is often no established dose equivalence or known safety profile when the substitute is combined with other therapies. Clinical trials are also hampered when drugs necessary for properly testing new regimens are scarce. The team found that nearly 12 percent of the time, drug shortages prevented enrollment in studies, delayed administration of a study drug, or suspended involvement of patients on clinical trials.

So where the rubber meets the road, or where the board of directors meets the wall street analysts, your health is secondary to quarterly reports.
But hey, it's not personal, it's business.