Replies

This kind of logic has always escaped me. The people that need this kind of drug are already dieing. What do they have to loose? Get them to sign off on it and use it!

Not all cancer patients are dying. These days, many cancers can be successfully treated. Would you pull someone off a potentially successful treatment regimen to test this drug?

This is not the only experimental treatment available for cancers. For every type of cancer, there are dozens of studies using promising new meds. This is just another promising new med.

While the drug companies might not pursue this research, there are certain to be university/non-profit/government studies. Who knows, DCA might even live up to its hype. Unlikely, but possible.

What I find interesting here is the anti-pharmaceutical company spin in most of the reporting on DCA chemotherapy. The leftist fantasy operating here is that people are dying because evil capitalist Big Pharma won't invest in an unpatentable product. As though all drug research was carried out by drug companies, and none by other institutions. This is trivially false, but hatred of capitalism blinds leftists to the obvious.

One finds a similar meme in the left's revisionist reporting of Big Tobacco's culpability in cancer deaths. Tobacco companies lied, millions died! As though tobacco companies were the only source of information about the health hazards of tobacco, or were somehow a more credible source of information that the many independent medical researchers who repeatedly showed tobacco to be a carcinogen, as far back as the 1940s. As though the popular press had never reported on the dangers of tobacco. As though what obviously happened, never happened.

Here's another example. Some leftists blames Ronald Reagan for increasing the number of AIDS deaths, because he took too long to mention the disease in his speeches. As though there were thousands of gay males who listened closely to Reagan's every word, who would have stopped having unprotected anal sex if Ron had only asked. As though all the warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities meant nothing, all the media publicity meant nothing, but a few words from Reagan would have caused gays to change their behavior.

Pathologically delusional.

Would you pull someone off a potentially successful treatment regimen to test this drug?

I'd think more like adding this drug on a trial basis to other treatments, especially when the other treatments are not known to work very well, or offering it in cases where the patient simply does not want the other treatments due to side effects.

Some leftists blames Ronald Reagan for increasing the number of AIDS deaths, because he took too long to mention the disease in his speeches. As though there were thousands of gay males who listened closely to Reagan's every word, who would have stopped having unprotected anal sex if Ron had only asked. As though all the warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities meant nothing, all the media publicity meant nothing, but a few words from Reagan would have caused gays to change their behavior.

You make a good point. And the real pathological irony here is that throughout all of this (and continuing to the present) the gay lobby has vehemently denied AIDS is a primarily gay disease. So how can Reagan or anyone else be complicit in gay AIDS deaths if it is not a gay disease in the first place?

IMO, the group MOST responsible for gay AIDS deaths is the gay lobby. They have blocked any (preventative) action that would reduce the spread of the disease. Talk about dying for a politcal cause.