what I'm still not understanding

is why... we care what terminally ill people want to do with their bodies. or why we should tell them what they can and cant do for that matter. If they understand all the risks associated with their choices then why tell them no you cant do that fuck you. they're going to die anyway ffs, but I would hope it to be illegal to force these types of things on people so yeah

someone please help me straighten this issue out

It is far fetched, you are right, but the point I was trying to make is everyone here is thinking that by allowing a terminally ill patient to take the drug, only that person will see consequences.  When really there is a much larger picture here.

By allowing terminally ill patients to just take whatever experimental drug they please opens all kinds of ethical and medical cans of worms.  Steel spoke on the ethical side of it a lot, and I agree with him on it.  He touched on what I meant by my original post, but said it in a much more realistic way.

Without knowing the side effects who really knows what these drugs could do to anyone?  While people may not be dropping dead left and right in my above scenario, it could be that side effects do not appear at first when the first "specimens" start treatment with the drug.  It could appear that the drug is effective at first, but really be causing some other problems.  Which I think is a much more realistic scenario.

Yeah. My argument is you're an ass.

Thank you for this meaningless flame. It contributes greatly to the conversation at hand!

How am I an ass? Because I want to test unapproved drugs on terminally ill patients? No, because that is not the reasoning behind my position. Yes, these drugs could have unpredictable effects, and I'm sure, believe it or not, that many of these terminally ill patients (whom might be in terrible pain anyways) are quite aware that there could be negative effects that go along with the drug.

The only problem I see is that it could give them some sense of false hope, and they may be exploited by drug companies as fast-forwarded human tests. Which I wouldn't like to see happen, despite, "BEING AN ASS."


...You fucking shit-head.

The point is I do recognize that there is some emotional distress going on here, but that once the patients have exhausted all other sources they are left with nothing but to accept their own death while keeping in mind the fact that there are medicines which could potentially help them. Please do not spew forth your retarded comments unless you are going to at least expand upon them.

EDIT: I am not suggesting we pump every terminally ill patient full of random medicines of which we have no human trials yet.

Also, I find it interesting that mankind tends to justify its morality based on old texts or ideas. We have a tendency to not what to evolve our morality. Hmm!

The point is I do recognize that there is some emotional distress going on here, but that once the patients have exhausted all other sources they are left with nothing but to accept their own death while keeping in mind the fact that there are medicines which could potentially help them.

potentially. however it is far more likely that these medicines will make their life even worse.

potentially. however it is far more likely that these medicines will make their life even worse.

Yes, that's why I said potentially. Congratulations you're on your way to becoming a dictionary.

EDIT: And I'm a little tipsy on this one, but almost all of you would just accept you were dying in that case and not try to fight it? I mean, really?

Thank you, Kaempfer. That was a good post.

And, I agree. Especially consider it isn't any stretch of the imagination that these drugs are held up far longer than the should be in a bureaucratic nightmare. The longer they are held up, the longer the patients have to wait for them (and these patients don't have time!). As, Kaempfer said, just because some drugs are held behind a wall of paper doesn't mean they are INSTANTLY POISON and will simultaneously give you Alzheimer's, HIV, and liver failure.

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but I can see at least one reason why "why does it matter what they want to use to try to keep living" doesn't work--say they let the patient take that experimental drug, and it kills them way faster than they were supposed to die.  The family then goes berserk whether the patient chose it or not because they just see it as WHAT A TERRIBLE DOCTOR GIVING THEM THAT DRUG WHY DONT THEY REGULATE THESE THINGS YOU KILLED MY FAMILY MEMBER

It's not the doctor's choice, but the doctor is going to be blamed if something goes wrong.  The medical field is INCREDIBLY sensitive, and you have to be VERY careful what you let through.  If we weren't so quick to always blame the doctors, I could see this MAYBE being something we should be letting them choose (although JohnnyCasil's points are dead on about giving others false hopes because one person might have had good luck with it), but if anything happened wrong, no matter whose choice it was that doctor is going to be in trouble.

Wow, just wow.

Because what if that one person takes the drug, and it cures him, but only him due to some specific circumstance in his body.  This is unknown of course, because the only thing the media sees the is the miracle drug that saved a man's life.  Other terminally ill patients rush to get this new 'miracle' drug.  Turns out the vast majority of these people do not have the specific bodily circumstance and for every 1 person that is cured, 100 die overnight from the drug.

It's I am Legend all over again

A waiver that states that these drugs are not approved by the FDA would obviously be needed. It would need to be signed probably by the patient, the doctor, some person on an FDA board, and maybe someone willing to sign to say that they agree the patient is in a stable emotional condition and appears lucid in his thinking. This should eliminate most of the possible court cases that could be brought up against this practice, ideally. Obviously not entirely though, as no system is without flaw.