“Disease” baskets should get smaller
I’m going to do something crazy and venture way out of my field, to say something that I have no business saying something about. Here it goes:
A disease is not necessarily identifiable by its symptoms. Several causes can lead to very similar symptoms and the treatment options could be completely different. In some cases, medicine (in the US, the FDA) understands that. That is why we have so many different anti-depressants because there are different kinds of depression. Depression is too broad of a term to uniquely identify the condition.
In some cases, medical authorities do not understand this very well. One example is most cancers. Many cancer drugs get developed that work very well on one group of patients and don’t harm the other patients who tried them but get voted down because they are not “effective enough” for the statistical sample.
The baskets we are using are too large to handle all possible treatments. We need to use smaller baskets and have a more utilitarian approach to medicine.
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June 8th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
i think the problem is to find which ‘kinds’ of smaller baskets to use. i.e. to figure our what factors (whether originating in the patient or the disease) lead to the different reactions of people to various treatments. also what you said is much less true about well understood diseases than about cancer, AIDS or depression.