My Blog, My Soapbox -- Political Interlude #4

For a significant portion of my career,  my job was to negotiate clinical trial agreements. I worked for an organization that provided health care, thus had access to patients, and so companies would contract with my employer to enroll its patients in various studies to determine the effectiveness of new drugs, treatments and so on. The office I worked for was responsible for negotiating those contracts.

While I'm no doctor, you did have to at least have a sense of what was planned for the study in order to negotiate the contract terms. It was always interesting to see what folks were studying: new drugs to treat new diseases; new combinations of drugs to try to improve current standards of care; new devices to make surgeries easier. Lots of cool stuff. 

Occasionally, though, we'd see the odd marketing study. Tests to find out if capsules or tablets were preferred by patients, or if the flavor of a medication change the willingness of patients to take it. At the time, these seemed like weird studies for the organization and its doctors to spend their energies on. Who the hell cares what flavor a medication comes in as long as the medication comes?

I'll admit it. I was wrong. Having now experienced what I've come to believe is the worst modern medicine has to deliver, I have to say I'd be far more willing to participate in a marketing study focused on improving the experience of the current standard of care than I would some effectiveness study to modify the standard of care. I care less now whether I'm taking poison A or poison B, than I do having whatever poison I'm taking not actually taste like poison -- or cause unrelated systems in my body react to it like poison.

In that spirit, I offer up a few suggested studies that I think would be a lovely investment of some intellectual power even if they aren't about finding new cures or treatments:

1. If Hillshire Farms (among way too many others) can take the scrapings from the floor of a slaughter house, mix it with chemicals, and turn it into a food that folks (myself included) will actually choose to eat, someone ought to be able to make a contrast agent that doesn't taste like toxic waste.

2. Speaking of taste, could we not figure out the dead Tin Man taste thing? It would be lovely for "tastes like cancer" be a meaningless phrase, rather than something that gets all the cancer patients nodding (and cringing) in unison.

3. Someone needs to figure out the ice thing. There has got to be something that could be added to, or removed from, the chemotherapy cocktail that would allow the person undergoing cancer treatment to enjoy a nice iced tea or lemonade while they're being treated.

4. Ditto on the neuropathy. There should be a better response to that than "wear gloves." 

I'm sure others undergoing chemo could identify lots of other areas of the experience that could be improved.

And I'd like to point out that while it looks increasingly likely I'm going to be lucky enough to avoid this particular outcome, for the folks whose last days are going to be spent undergoing cancer treatments, it would be lovely if that experience didn't have to be such a hellish ordeal. People should die enjoying a lemonade on their patio while they watch the setting sun (for example), not being beat to hell by the side effects of chemotherapy.

A quick Google search tells me the National Cancer Institute alone spends $4.9 billion a year on research. Maybe a few of those dollars, rather than being directed at the so far not terribly successful effort to cure cancer, could be productively directed to making the current menu of treatment options a little more palatable.