alt Hacker News>The bigger problem with trials is not the danger, so much as the fact that they're unlikely to do anything.
And? What is the point of this observation? Of course they are unlikely to do anything. Your other option is to do nothing and die. Nothing wrong with that if that's what people choose to do...'accept their fate' and all that. I'm not opposed to it at all, there's a certain appeal to it.
But when your wife and the mother of your two beautiful daughters is laying helpless on nature's altar you fucking move dude. You don't do nothing.
The point is exactly what I said: “doing something”, in this case, is not the same thing as “saving your loved one’s life.”
> Your other option is to do nothing and die
I really don’t want to be this blunt, but I don’t know how to say it any other way: death is not an option. When you’re at the stage of clinical trials for cancer therapies, it is the inevitable outcome. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in the trial. Maybe it extends the inevitable, maybe it doesn’t. The odds lean heavily toward the latter. And there’s also always a cost.
I’ve lost friends and family to cancer too, and watching people you love torture themselves with ineffective (or even minimally effective) treatments is agonizing.
When it comes to clinical trials, you need to start with the cold, hard reality that you’re doing an altruistic experiment with the remaining portion of your life. There are lot of people who don’t understand that, and see trials as some kind of back-door to better treatment.