Cancer medicine generates enormous revenues but marginal benefits for patients?
I was really hoping for a strong conclusion to this article - a powerful answer to the obvious question of &#x27;so what now?&#x27;.  After all, the author has just spent a lot of words tearing down the (generally well-meaning) attempts of scientists (and others) to prolong the lives of people who are diagnosed with cancer.<p>But all we get at the end is <i>&quot;Conservative cancer medicine, as I envision it, would engage in less testing, treatment, fear-mongering, military-style rhetoric and hype. It would recognize the limits of medicine, and it would honor the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.&quot;</i>.<p>Fuckin&#x27; really?  No details, no data, no actual suggestion (or idea?) of how to actually implement this?  No analysis of how (or even whether) this will help people?<p>And of course, let&#x27;s ignore the fundamental hypocrisy here: having just spent an article discussing how shit doctors (apparently) are at doing the best thing for their patients, he apparently wants doctors to be the ones in control of this new, &#x27;do less&#x27; approach?  Fucking clueless clickbait blog nonsense - the Scientific American should be ashamed that this made it through their editorial process as is.<p>-<p>Also, let&#x27;s examine these two sections:<p><i>&quot;But one study found that 72 new anticancer drugs approved by the FDA between 2004 and 2014 prolonged survival for an average of 2.1 months. A 2017 report concluded that “most cancer drug approvals have not been shown to, or do not, improve clinically relevant end points,” including survival and quality of life.<p>Medical conservatives happily adopt new therapies “when the benefit is clear and the evidence strong and unbiased,” the authors emphasize, but many alleged advances “offer, at best, marginal benefits.”&quot;</i><p>Who, exactly, is going to serve as the judge and jury for what constitutes a sufficient improvement in clinically relevant endpoints?  Should that role be given to &quot;medical conservatives&quot; - i.e. people who the author thinks are more trustworthy than people who disagree with him?<p>(PS I fully understand the application of cost:benefit analyses to new drugs - and maybe this is a direction that the US needs to go.  But note that the author&#x27;s conclusion section didn&#x27;t even touch on this as an option.)