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When to use “Miracle Drugs”

April 2, 2007 on 1:01 am | In Main |

I sometimes wonder whether the pressure from pharmaceutical companies to get cancer drugs subsidised by the NHS is necessarily in the best interests of patients.

A family member recently died after a long struggle with breast cancer, but before she succumbed she managed to get three years off her death sentence through intervention by her doctors with modern cancer drugs.

Her response to some of these was nothing less than miraculous: Each time treatment literally brought her out of her “deathbed” to normal life for between 12 and 18 months within weeks of starting the treatment.

The two drugs in question were Tamoxifen and Arimidex. A newer one on the list now is Herceptin. Not all breast cancers respond but when they do the results can be amazing even though they do not last forever.

As a result of the success of these medicines there is a lot of pressure by patients and pharmaceutical companies to get them to women in early stages of breast cancer in the hope that they will fight off “rogue” cancer cells left in women who have their first brush with the killer disease.

In our case treatment was left until the cancer returned ten years after the initial scare. By then she had been given a death sentence by her doctors and was given six months to live.

However Tamoxifen had her up and living a normal life before succumbing again 18 months later. Then Arimidex provided a second “miracle” that kept her alive and enjoying relationships with her family for more than another year.

But you only get one shot with these medicines. Once the cancer has broken through, it will not put the patient into remission a second time.

So I have to ask the question. “Is is better to use wonder drugs like this as some sort of insurance policy in somebody who may well have already gained the benefit of mastectomy or chemotherapy earlier in her life, or to wait until they are within months of certain death and perhaps gain another three wonderful years with family and friends?”

JSM