Ever wonder what happens when you live in a parsimonious country that isn't willing to spend any money on new treatments against cancer?
"Cancer patients having to dig deep for new drugs"
TORONTO -- Whether patients survive cancer increasingly depends on where they live and how much of their own money they can afford to spend on the latest drugs, an advocacy group reported Monday. "Essentially, we will continue to ration life-saving cancer treatment, and some Canadians will live and some will die simply because of where they live," said the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada report.
Ever wonder what happens when you live in a pusillanimous country that isn't willing to exterminate people with cancer who are bleeding the national treasure dry?
"Private chemotherapy clinics on the rise in Canada"
At least 20 private infusion clinics are scheduled to open in six provinces by the end of 2007, the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada reported in its annual report card. Bayshore Infusion Clinics are a collaborative enterprise involving Roche Canada, a drug company licensed to produce Avastin, Herceptin, Rituxan, Xeloda, and Tarceva; Bayshore Clinics, which provides the facilities; and McKesson Canada, which is administering the program. At these clinics, patients can buy cancer medicine not covered by their provincial governments. Medication is administered to cancer patients by a nurse under a doctor's supervision. Providing the infusion service at a hospital would be seen as an infringement of the Canada Health Act as it could be considered paying for a medically necessary service.
I am not a Pollyanna when it comes to judging the benefits of new, expensive anti-cancer treatments. It is obvious that many new targeted therapies produce only a modest improvement in statistical outcomes such as time to progression, or relapse-free survival. I understand why some governments decline to cover the costs of these agents, given the fact that they are not instant cures.
Just don't tell my patients that you're doing them a favor by denying them these treatments. More progress has been made in the fight against cancer in the past ten years than in the fifty before, and beyond that, a veil mercifully obscures the faces of the desolated. Understanding the machinations of cancer and then testing hypotheses of treatment is a slow process, but make no mistake about it - we are moving in the right direction. There is no turning back now. New revelations about cancer and new treatments are appearing almost monthly now. Ultimate success against malignant disease will someday become reality, and on that day many will recall with satisfying derision those who, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, chose to stand athwart history and yell "Stop!"
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Cancer therapy does not have to be as expensive and as unsuccessful as it is. I live in North Carolina. Two of my heroes are Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD who now lives in British Columbia. He wrote a book "Vitamin C and Cancer" 2000 that tells how he lengthened the lives of advanced cancer patients by prescribing oral high-dose vitamin C and other vitamins. Buy the book. His work is the basis for my book "Vitamins Can Kill Cancer" that describes in useable form how cancer patients of many types can easily live longer with less pain. Hoffer's therapy is well demonstrated and safe enough that many believe fancy tests are not needed.
The second Canadian I honor, nurse Caisse, developed Essiac Tea before she died. I would use it if my prostate cancer comes back.
The local health food store has a type called Flor-essence available in dry or liquid form. Reagan, Houston, MS, PE.
Oddly enough for tax reasons I figured out how much my drugs cost me last year.
$4935
I have to laugh at the irony of the CTV.CA website article describing one's infringement of the Canada Health Act by "paying for a medically necessary service".
The anti-democratic restrictions on access to health care - coupled with fully taxpayer funding of health care - are always ignored or downplayed when supporters of starting "universal health care" in the US crank up their campaign.
Having been in the position lately to consider Herceptin, I have decided to decline. The drug is too expensive; the anticipated benefits are too small; the drug has potential side effects that could ruin the quality of my life and the disruption of my life during treatment is too great to accept it. I can understand why a government may shy away from offering it at this time. However, also from being in the position to have to consider it, I can understand why some people are upset that the drugs are not offered to them. Nobody wants to die this way. It is too bad that we don't live in a perfect world where everyone gets what they need. But to quote Dana Reeves "Life is not fair. Quit expecting it to be."
To Reagan Houston:
I beg to differ with your admiration of Vitamin C as an effective cytotoxic agent. Multiple clinical trials have shown it to be no better than placebo in shrinking tumors and/or prolonging survival. For detailed information go to this link:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/c.html
As for Essiac, it is a tea containing burdock, rhubarb, sheep sorrel and slippery elm, and has not only been shown to have no effect against cancer, researchers have published a recent study showing Essiac does not even improve the quality of life nor the mood of Canadian women with breast cancer. Here is a link to that paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do…
For more enlightenment I refer you to my fellow ScienceBlogger Orac:
http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2004/12/understanding-alternative-medicin…
I practice near the Canadian border. We have Canadians who come in and pay cash on the barrel head for services denied them there.
Reasons vary from a desire for the more exotic (wanting ablation for a rhythm problem because the patient travels so much that taking pills regularly is difficult) to the highly mundane problems that their system fails to address. One of the worst - an active male who had chronic atrial fibrillation and had not, despite multiple visits to his MD, been offered heart rate control or stroke prevention with appropriate blood thinners.
If we go to single payer health care, I will find a way to make a living. It may not be in medicine that I do that. However, I'm terrified about the loss of choice Single Payer Care might mean for my own family members when they are ill.
Echo Doc
The Canadian system does seem particularly inflexable - certainly here in the UK you can freely go private if you want, and I believe that a lot of European countries do a basic (provided by state) + top-up insurance system.
A totally free market approach to healthcare will always tend to offer the well-off expensive treatments of questionable value to the rich whilst the poor die of easily treated conditions, which is why no first world country relies on it. The question is always where you put the public/private divide..
I can't tell you that the Canadian Health system
does not have a lot of problems and I certainly
believe that the most advanced medicine in the world
is practiced in the USA. However I think that it is
fair to point out that Canada spends about one-half
per capita on healthcare versus the USA and gets
better results. Canadians live longer and specifically
have fewer potential years of lost life from cancers. Canada
also does better in other major disease categories.
Yes the Canadian system is not without its problems, and many treatments are not immediately embraced. However I was able to make my decision about Hercepin based on its potential value to me without regard to price.
I've listened to a lot of women who have battled with insurance companies or wondered what to do about finances when they came to a similar choice.