(05-30-2018 04:11 PM)EigenEagle Wrote: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/politics/...index.html
This is long overdue, and frankly he should get credit for doing this while Obama with the half ton of paper that was the Obamacare bill never did this.
It's a win for patients with terminal illnesses and their families because maybe it will save or prolong some lives.
It's a win for medical science because we may have reached the limit on what we can learn about drugs from animal models and it will move along the process of drugs that are waiting to be tested in a clinical setting.
It's a win for pharma companies because it might very well expedite the process of getting their experimental drugs to market.
I literally can't see a single downside.
Yup.
Quick personal account-
Met the lovely and talented Ms. Dunk, yea so many years ago. We’re dating, we get engaged, plan the wedding some ten months or so out from there.
She gets a phone call. After an awkward tennis swing her mother thinks she may have cracked a rib or something. Dealt with it for few days, but the pain became too much.
Goes to Doc, X-rays whatever and yup, cracked rib indeed. Problem was, it wasn’t the tennis swing, it was the multiple myeloma that had spread quickly through her body since her last regular exam.
Long story longer, there are varying approaches- make comfy, prepare to say goodbye. Go the periodic chemo type route, see if you can stave it off, OR there’s this one place in Arizona that’s doing cutting edge stuff in basically experimental stages and would take six months to a year.
Welp, a year it was. Family and friends rotated in and out to act as informal “caregivers”, cooking for her, laundry, doc and hospital visits etc.
LOTs of hills and valleys since, many setbacks, yet many successes too.
She didn’t think she’d even see her eldest daughter get married, let alone her other two still in school. Now she’s seen two of her her grandkids graduate High School and head off to college themselves. The other four soon to follow. It’s been more than 25 years.
There are entire studies, journals, courses written and now taught on her case alone.
Point of all this- if there hadn’t been this emerging program, one you had to OPT-IN too, there’s no chance she’d still be with us.
They weighed the options, decided on the long-shot and obviously its paid off in bushel baskets.
Not to mention the hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions one day of other lives her case will aid in treating going forward.
Many call it a miracle, fine, I call it kickass science...