Welcome to the forum thread for "Should Dying Patients Have a Right to Use Experimental Drugs?"  This is the Justice Talking show for the week of April 16-April 22.

Should patients who are seriously ill or dying have the legal right to try drugs that haven’t yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration? Last December the FDA proposed new guidelines that would allow access to experimental treatments on a case-by-case basis. But some health care professionals fear that access to drugs that are not yet proven safe is dangerous, unethical and disastrous for the drug approval process. Tune in to this edition of Justice Talking as we ask who should have the right to use experimental drugs.

Please post your comments on this Justice Talking issue using this thread.

Thanks for your participation!

Laura Sider
Outreach Coordinator

I will answer a bit tongue in cheek:  Why not?   Why not give experimental drugs to dying patients?  Doctors give experimental drugs to ill patients who agree to such simply because they don't have health coverage.  They agree because they have no other way of having some kind of follow-up in their illness.    This is what happened to my mom.  She had breathing problems, signed up for some sort of experimental drug, and two years later died. Was it worthwhile? Can I even ask the question "did she have the right to use experiemental drugs?"  Oh yeah, SHE wasn't a terminally ill patient at the time.

The question itself is misleading.  I mean, how can we say yes when such experimental drugs can be dangerous?  Oh yeah, that's right.  The patients are dying anyway;  They're gonna die anyway.  Might as well make it worth our while.  But where is the humanity in such reasoning?  We are not talking about the patients' right to use such drugs.  We are actually asking if it is  morally permissible for US (not just the doctors but also us, the future patient) to ask them to take them. 

 My mom (Cassondra Draper) made her decision because she thought she had no other choice.  I don't know if all of her subsequent health problems were side effects or not, but I found the medical community of Albuquerque, New Mexico rather callous of her condition when I found her bed ridden in her own home, unable to walk, front door unlocked so that the mailman could come in and hand her her mail.  She was 55 when she died.  I sure hope it was all worthwhile.

Ronda Lewis

Ronda, allow me first to express empathy to your late Mother's untimely death. 

Free people should be able to make decisions to permit use of an experimental drug or new surgical procedure.  When poverty, lack of health insurance, disinformation come into play it is no longer the decision of the patient, though on the surface it appears to be. 

Allow me to suggest a web site summary of basic human rights for people with health issues: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Styx/6756/

We will continue to have a medical nemesis until we develop rational policy for ALL people to have affordable, universal health insurance.   Elisabeth Ellenbogen