WHAT? NOTHING AFTER CHEMO?
Dear MISTER SASB: My grandmother’s got stomach cancer. She’s had surgery, drugs, and chemo. Now the doctor says she should get hospice care which totally (if it’s okay to say) sucks big time. Grannie taught me to read and to ride a bike and even how to cut cocaine. There MUST be something they can do! – Nancy Trill
Dear Nancy:
It sounds like yer granny could open up her own pharmacy.
Anyway, to answer your question, her Docs COULD get your granny hooked up with a clinical trial that offers some new hope. But they probably won’t. Denise Mann (Web MD) says most patients who could qualify for clinical trials, won’t even hear about them. At least, not from their own doctors.
This doesn’t mean doctors are a bunch of bums. The ones I’ve worked with (and consulted) are almost uniformly terrific. They work hard and they’re, mostly, very smart. BUT they are human (surprise!). Just so many hours in a day. Just so many dollars in a paycheck. They can’t be everywhere. Can’t do everything. Gotta go home sometime. And this has a lot to do with why they’re shy about introducing their patients to clinical trials. Keeping up with 8,000 trials is SLIGHTLY impossible. When would that “keeping up” happen? Before 5 AM? Or after 2 PM? Medicine is intense. The hours are long and the stakes are high. And there’s a lot of required reading just to stay current in day-to-day practice.
Also, there’s the relationship thing. Maybe a particular clinical study does offer “a shot” (usually a long one). Still. It probably means the patient’s off to some distant place at a time that’s infinitely crappy and emotional horrendous. And the patient and his.her doc often have a thing going, a doctor patient relationship. Believe it or not, separating from the Doc who took the patient this far down Dismal Road can be tough for both the patient and the physician.
INVESTIGATE EARLY
People, naturally, do the regular stuff, first. If things don’t work out, maybe they start looking around for unregular stuff. It’s tempting to see clinical trials like the extra innings. After the first nine. (A little baseball metaphor here.) Well, sorry, Bub, but that may be too late. Some of these trials won’t let patients who are practically gonners into their programs. They need to get at them earlier in the progression of the disease.
THE RIGHT ANSWER
You’re kidding, right? If I knew the right answers to this stuff, do you think I’d be sitting here cranking out blog articles? I don’t know how to get doctors back into this loop either. But something’s gotta change. That’s for sure. It’s not right to expect patients, on their own and at the worst possible time in their lives, to become medical detectives, capably sorting through the relevant research. And it’s not like NO doctors are referring to clinicals. Maybe we need to understand what the doctors who get this right are doing.
Mister ScienceAintSoBad‘s an optimist. He thinks things will improve.
Sooner’s better than later.
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Credit for above cartoon (which I don’t exactly understand either) to, xkcd.