Breast cancer

[Richardp]

Breast cancer victim Ann Marie Rogers was left "angry and devastated" after losing her High Court battle over her local NHS trust's refusal to fund treatment with the drug Herceptin.
surely if there is any chance that this drug will help her it should be made available, whats the point of developeing all these drugs if there too expensive to use and anyway if she lived in a different area she would have got it.

 

[Slogger]

i agree totally

we need to get the nhs to make sure the uk born people have the best there is to offer and lets make any fugee wait or better yet denied any help

 

[Gary_M]

Breast cancer victim Ann Marie Rogers was left "angry and devastated" after losing her High Court battle over her local NHS trust's refusal to fund treatment with the drug Herceptin.
surely if there is any chance that this drug will help her it should be made available, whats the point of developeing all these drugs if there too expensive to use and anyway if she lived in a different area she would have got it

Agreed. Altough I feel that it is the 'drug companies' who are at fault - they are some of the richest companies world-wide, and given the certain budget restrictions imposed on the NHS (which in reality we will never resolve), the answer would be for the drug companies to make less profits and lower their prices

 

[hermes]

i agree totally

we need to get the nhs to make sure the uk born people have the best there is to offer and lets make any fugee wait or better yet denied any help

Slogger can't you put a sock in it, you are just boring.

 

[mlb3c]

again....I can't speak for UK. But drug companies (in US-most of them) do offer their drugs at a lower rate and even free to people who are unable to pay-granted the drugs have to FDA approved, but the help is out there-but not enough- unfortunately, in a lot of cases....especially if a large number of people are affected such as HIV, Hepatitis, Cancer,....it comes down to money. That has and always will be the "bottom line"

 

[Gary_M]

again....I can't speak for UK. But drug companies (in US-most of them) do offer their drugs at a lower rate and even free to people who are unable to pay-granted the drugs have to FDA approved, but the help is out there-but not enough- unfortunately, in a lot of cases....especially if a large number of people are affected such as HIV, Hepatitis, Cancer,....it comes down to money. That has and always will be the "bottom line"

It is similar in the UK (certain people will get 'free' drugs). The only problem is that they don't come direct from the drug company - the GP has to prescribe and pay for them from the drug company. Each GP has his own budget, therefore he is unlikely to prescribe something that will cost £1000's per year for one person. I don't agree with our system as it is putting a price on someone's life. I do understand the dilemmas of the GP - if he gives one person £20,000 worth of drugs per year, another person would suffer, so he/she is making a decision on what he thinks is the best 'all round' option

Again it boils down to the extortiante prices the companies are charging for their drugs. I can accept that they spend millions on research, but they still make billions in profits. This would suggest there was room for some negotiation.

 

[poshman]

Breast cancer victim Ann Marie Rogers was left "angry and devastated" after losing her High Court battle over her local NHS trust's refusal to fund treatment with the drug Herceptin.
surely if there is any chance that this drug will help her it should be made available, whats the point of developeing all these drugs if there too expensive to use and anyway if she lived in a different area she would have got it.

my wife had a scare the other month but luckily after tests she was ok, her mate was not so lucky and was diagnosed breast cancer. but its a happy ending as she got the all clear today
but without even asking he has prescibed her the drug Herceptin !!!!! good for her but as you say why develope them and then say they are too expensive ?? whats Mr Blairs take on this ???

 

[69er]

Hi

They do prescribe it on the nhs to people but only if other treatments won't work. They had a specialist on the radio and in this case if she takes other therapy then she has a 70% chance of surviving. The main differences between the 2 are the side effects. If normal treatment will work then what gives her the right to demand something else?

 

[Richardp]

maybe they should nationalise the drug companies but then they would probably lose the funding for research.the drug companies should be reined in. It like they have the power over life and death.

 

[Richardp]

i agree totally

we need to get the nhs to make sure the uk born people have the best there is to offer and lets make any fugee wait or better yet denied any help

well done slogger consistant if nothing else.

 

[johnny_t]

This is always going to sound heartless, especially when there is a real person involved, but it does all come down to money as mentioned above. Medical research is coming on so quickly that with a limitless pot of money, you could keep everyone alive well into their hundreds, but we haven't got that limitless pot and can't afford to.

The reason Cancer is so prevalent these days is because less people die earlier from other stuff. Even in this case, you could cure the cancer, and then she could develop a different form in a few years, or move onto a different illness or wind up bedridden in a home suffering from Alzheimers or crippled by Osteoporosis. Whenever you cure one thing, you are only passing time until something else gets you. Maybe we just need to accept more that when your time's up, your time's up.

I don't know whether drug companies make vast profits or not, but they have to make some otheriwse they wouldn't do it (no-one is suggesting that research scientists should do it on a voluntary basis for the greater good, for example) and if they didn't do it, then we wouldn't have this discussion, so is it better that some benefit, even if it is just the relatively wealthy (from a global perspective) or that we don't develop the drugs and no-one benefits but also no-one feels as if they are losing out ?

It is tricky, and you have to feel sorry for those who get ill like this, but we just can't afford to keep everyone patched up indefinitely.

 

[kendor]

those that saw a recent documentary set in brazil will see the injustice of artificially high prices for certain drugs when neighbouring affluent countries pay next to nothing for the same drug. how can these executives sleep at night after watching how one poor child suffered in pain so unnecessarily and eventually died not for the efforts of his mother risking arrest and imprisonment in trying to smuggle the drug back into brazil for her son only to see him die in agony later on when the drug ran out again.

an extract from a journal highlighting the problem:

Large Pharmaceutical Companies—Profit at all costs?Multinational pharmaceutical companies neglect the diseases of the tropics, not because the science is impossible but because there is, in the cold economics of the drugs companies, no market.

There is, of course, a market in the sense that there is a need: millions of people die from preventable or curable diseases every week. But there is no market in the sense that, unlike Viagra, medicines for leishmaniasis are needed by poor people in poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies judge that they would not get sufficient return on research investment, so why, they ask, should we bother? Their obligation to shareholders, they say, demands that they put the effort into trying to find cures for the diseases of affluence and longevity—heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s. Of the thousands of new compounds drug companies have brought to the market in recent years, fewer than 1% are for tropical diseases.

…

In the corporate headquarters of major drug companies, the public relations posters display the image they like to present: of caring companies that bring benefit to humanity, relieving the suffering of the sick. What they don’t say, is that, so far, their humanity has not extended beyond the limits of the pockets of the sick.

— Isabel Hilton, A Bitter Pill For The World’s Poor, The Guardian, January 5, 2000

 

[pickles]

97% of women survive breast cancer for at least 5 years and the long term survival rate is well over 80%. If I had to have a cancer I would certainly choose it (yes blokes can and do get it as well) compared to say lung cancer.

This womans story has to be seen in the context of those statistics, but it does show unfortunately how the underfunding of the NHS sometimes causes problems. If she had cover with any of the major insurers she would not have had a problem

So go and buy some cover now if you can afford it. Cancer is still the 2nd biggest killer after heart disease

Just remember that little voice at the back of your head which says "nah that can't happen to me" is a liar

 

[Richardp]

Just remember that little voice at the back of your head which says "nah that can't happen to me" is a liar

yes I remember that little voice, it goes away when you hit fifty

 

[Brightness]

OK then I feel I am in some way 'qualified' to speak up for the drug companies here, seeing as Pharmaceuticals is the field I have always worked in....


Drugs when they are first launched are extremely expensive for the following reasons....

The drug companies have to claw back their intial investment in the product.

A drug could take six months or twenty years to develop and it all takes money. Staff, machinery, laboratories, products, loads of things....

If a drug gets rejected then the drug company is the one who loses out. If it is widely accepted then once they have made back their development costs the drug costs will start to fall.

Herceptin is a fairly new drug and that is why it is so expensive, the drug company in question here, Roche, will have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds developing it.

Drug companies also pay for research scientists & equipment for hospitals and also sponsor pharmacists to train at uni (ie providing equipment etc).

Before long, the drug Trastuzumab (Herceptin) will also be made by other companies (Roche eventually have to 'share' their secret!!!!) and then the costs will drop.

I am not defending the drug not being prescribed btw. I believe that if someone needs a drug to save their life then they should have it.

Also, if people stopped ordering repeat prescriptions when they didn't need them, there would be far less wastage of drugs and more money for others.

The prime culprits for this are nursing homes and elderly people who order their own prescriptions. The amount of wastage from these people is criminal and costs the NHS millions of pounds every year.

Once a drug leaves the pharmacy then no one knows the storage conditions and so if it is returned as unwanted it has to go into the DOOP bin.

I honestly wish that people who regularly order drugs they don't want/need could see the costs of them. To be perfectly frank, if a GP has just 2 or 3 of these patients on his books then it could stop someone else getting the treatment they need.

I once had to DOOP a whole load of stuff from someone who had passed away. There must have been about 3 years worth of medication that had never been touched - some of these pills cost £100 plus a month!

That is why if you are on repeat medications, your GP will only let you now have a few of those repeats before they want to see you for a review of your meds.


Oh and incidentally, Viagra wasn't actually developed as a drug to help improve a mans erection. It was actually being developed for something else but one of the side effects was that it did produce an erection and was considered to be too embarrassing to proceed. They then marketed it for what it's now prescribed for and the price of it has dropped dramatically
Hope this makes sense to you all.