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AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

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Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand how in this day and age we still allow people to die suffering this way. How come we are ok with euthanasia for pets but not people?

It doesn't need to be legal to do it. People commit suicide all the time. The government doesn't need to be involved in each and every section of our lives, from cradle to grave.

Those attempts sometimes fail, and then people might be in an even worse condition than they were before. Maybe quadriplegic and/or in a psych ward.

The government is involved in every section of our lives. Births are registered, deaths are tracked, and mysterious deaths are investigated. But in this case, the government is asked to exactly not be involved; just giving licensed professionals* the permission to perform euthanasia under certain conditions.

*: not necessarily doctors if they want to stick to a strict interpretation of the Hippocratic oath

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father died of lung cancer. I also ran a failed medical tourism company which sent people to get this treatment in Cuba. More modern versions of the Cuban treatment are now few approved in the USA as immunotherapy. Didn’t save my dad

Sorry about your Dad but did it help other people? How many did you send and how many had positive outcomes in terms of prolonged life above the expected outcome?

Since I settled with the trump white house I keep my mouth shut on outcomes. I am Happy I did it

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father died of lung cancer. I also ran a failed medical tourism company which sent people to get this treatment in Cuba. More modern versions of the Cuban treatment are now few approved in the USA as immunotherapy. Didn’t save my dad

So sorry to hear about your dad! > I also ran a failed medical tourism company which sent people to get this treatment in Cuba Why did the company fail? How effective was the treatment?

Trump banned it

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#144
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife was diagnosed in Nov '23. Stage 4. She had a mutation that allowed Tagrisso/osimertinib. There are many mutations, but this one is prevalent in Asian women who have never smoked. There was a trial published just after her diagnosis that showed progression free survival at 2 years of 57% (chemo+osimertinib) vs 41% (osimertinib). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2306434 She's 6 days into the chemo. T…

I wish her and you all the strength in the world.

Thank you.

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#145
post #30

Is there actually some kind of list which shows in a table what kind of cancers are currently treatable by which experimental medicine?

clinicaltrials.gov has it all. There's a scraped sqlite database out of a team in israel, i think it's called cdcdb. this summarizes "current clinical experiments". Regarding preclinical, it's a wild west, and nobody really knows if it works or not since it's preclinical by definition.

Secondly, the site nccn contains all the treatment algorithms. The treatment algorithms (thousands of sloppy figure pdf pages) are free. They have something more structured (as I understand it, have never seen it) that you have to pay for. These are based on all of the currently available clinical evidence (LOTS of studies). Generally they are along the lines of - subtype your cancer into one of X number of subtypes, treat each subtype with this treatment, and when that fails, move onto this treatment, and when that fails, move onto this treatment, and when that fails, there's no standard but here are you options.

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way around this is group health insurance through employers. Often they allow you to take the policy with you when you leave the employer. The underwriting is done with a group, so the standards are lower and less intrusive.

Interesting. The few times I've seen that, it's typically something like $20k-$50k, which seems more intended to get you through a few months, catch up on bills, etc, but not "family is financially secure for years". Perhaps you can get more via employer-sponsored plans, it just never was presented to me in the few corporate jobs I've had over the years (but boy oh boy did they try to sell cancer insurance!)

I guess it depends on the company. Mine offers up to 5x salary.

Re: AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US approval follows the path of one treatment for one ailment. so if something was useful for 100 ailments, it needs 100 different approvals, and a company willing to attempt doing that what more likely happens is one treatment is denied for the one ailment the company thought they were tackling, and that one treatment is never pursued again so there's a lot of waste in this particular approach to protecting the publ…

One other facet to consider is that it is already legal to for doctors to the medicine for any of those 100 approvals. those trials serve three purposes, 1) to generate high quality data to support doctor choice, 2) provide defense for medical malpractice suits against doctors, and 3) support insurance reimbursement. Doctors already have discretion to prescribe Tagrisso for the common flu. However, a doctor that does…

Oh this is interesting. Basically any "unproven" remedy or treatment can be called upon by any doctor, if they're willing to forego insurance and some legal protection.

I was under the impression that patients having to "wait" for approvals would be missing out. But in theory you could get a lot of experimental treatments if you're willing to take the risk?

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