Cancer Category Archives — Page 2 of 36 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

July 17, 2022

As medical costs, especially for cancer, slam patients, where’s Congress?

While Congress seems paralyzed or, at best, willing to shrink significantly its efforts to help Americans deal with the punishing costs of care in the U.S. medical system, could federal lawmakers be confronted at the same time with more compelling evidence about the need for aggressive, not timid, action?

Do beleaguered constituents need to barrage members of the House and Senate with copies of an excellent, painful series from NPR and the nonpartisan Kaiser Health News service on the crushing effects of medical debt on regular folks, especially cancer patients? Must voters write, call, and email representatives to ensure they see the research findings of the Kaiser Family Foundation or the Commonwealth Fund about how nightmarish the U.S. medical system has become?

In detailing the “financial toxicity” that cancer patients experience with bankrupting treatment, KHN reporter Noam Levey mixes poignant human stories with scary economic data to detail how care for a leading killer of Americans may have improved medically but has become a calamity of a different sort. He makes these points among others (quoted liberally but without their sourcing, not fully included in these bullets for brevity’s sake):

June 28, 2022

FDA bans Juul vaping products and seeks to slash nicotine in cigarettes

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators have cracked down on Big Tobacco and its zealous, profit-seeking promotion of products that fuel some of the leading causes of preventable disease in this country: cigarette smoking and vaping.

The federal Food and Drug Administration ordered the maker of Juul, a pioneer in pushing so-called e-cigarettes and vape flavorings on the young, to pull its products off the markets.

Agency experts also made public their plans to order Big Tobacco to slash the nicotine in conventional cigarettes, a move designed to gut the addictive allure that is foundational to an estimated $95 billion-a-year industry.

June 14, 2022

With medical ‘news’, paying attention to two N’s can matter to nth degree

by Patrick A. Malone

While hope can be a remarkable element in healing the sick and injured, can there be anything crueler than raising false hopes among the vulnerable?

Patients with serious illnesses like cancer — of the pancreas, breast, and rectum — may need to take in with extra care journalistic reports on medical advances that might affect their treatment.

Two N’s will matter a lot to them — nuance and the scientific short-hand in which medical scientists communicate how many subjects participated in their research (the value described as N=).

May 3, 2022

Banning menthol from cigarettes will save many Black lives, researchers say

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators say they soon will ban the manufacture, distribution, and retail and wholesale selling of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, an action expected to take effect in a year or two and which anti-smoking advocates argue could save hundreds of thousands of lives of black and young Americans.

The Food and Drug Administration says the best available evidence argues powerfully for its planned ban, which some opponents have flipped as risky for one of the biggest groups that researchers say will benefit: African Americans.

Big Tobacco has targeted black consumers for decades, getting them and young people addicted to powerful nicotine by pushing the soothing effect of mint-derived menthol on the harshness of cigarette smoke, as the Washington Post reported:

April 26, 2022

Specialized cancer hospitals hike drug costs by up to 630%, study finds

by Patrick A. Malone

While patients often seek treatment at big, fancy hospitals, in part because they are designated as National Cancer Institute centers, these institutions provide a sticker-shock surprise for those receiving their specialized care: They jack up the already sky-high cost of prescription cancer drugs with markups going up from 120% to 630% above what they pay for the medications.

Those are the findings of researchers at the Harvard and Yale medical schools and elsewhere as reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine publication. As they noted with expert restraint:

“The findings of this study suggest that, to reduce the financial burden of cancer treatment for patients, institution of public policies to discourage or prevent excessive hospital price markups on … chemotherapeutics may be beneficial.”

March 30, 2022

FDA takes new fire for approving drugs too fast, with too little evidence

by Patrick A. Malone

Taxpayers and lawmakers may be grasping just how far in the wrong direction the federal Food and Drug Administration has gone in approving prescription drugs for sale on U.S. markets — in too much haste and with too little facts about whether the new drugs really work and are safe.

The issue, of course, may have stormed into public awareness when drug maker Biogen got the FDA to give fast-track approval for Aduhelm. It’s a medication targeted at Alzheimer’s but with light evidence of its benefits to patients. Biogen set such a sky-high price for Aduhelm that Medicare announced one of its biggest, recent premium increases and an expert furor exploded over the med and its approval.

That, in turn, has put the FDA processes under new, intense scrutiny, particularly as critics noted that 14 of 50 new drugs approved last year alone by the agency, including Aduhelm, received expedited review, Axios, the news and information site reported.

March 18, 2022

As ‘synthetic’ nicotine loophole shuts, warnings about cannabis edibles

by Patrick A. Malone

Grownups have gotten stark reminders why they must stay vigilant against buck-raking enterprises that exploit young people’s experimentation with intoxicants. Even as Congress has shut a legal loophole used by the vaping industry to keep addicting its customers to harmful nicotine, other dealers are pushing candy-like marijuana edibles on youths.

In passing a $1.5 trillion bill to keep funding the federal government, lawmakers on Capitol Hill also extended the authority of the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate not only nicotine from tobacco but also its synthetic varieties.

This was not an esoteric matter of chemistry or pharmacology. It became a flashpoint between regulators anxious to crackdown on harmful vaping and vendors who tweaked their products, so customers could get potent, addictive jolts from nicotine purportedly was made in a lab. This, vendors claimed, put their vaping devices — notably the pen-like “Puff Bar” that surged in popularity among youths — beyond FDA oversight.

February 9, 2022

As Biden reprises ‘moon shot,’ cancer battle’s constraints are clear, too

by Patrick A. Malone

President Biden, returning to an important health issue with which he has deep, tragic personal connection, has reprised a White House call for a “moon shot” campaign to keep the public and the medical establishment focused on finding even more effective ways to battle cancer, a leading killer of Americans.

Biden wants the nation to halve its cancer death rate. But aside from using the bully pulpit of the presidency and pushing people in his administration to promote and oversee cancer-fighting proposals, he did not discuss new federal money for research or treatment.

The president, who lost a son to brain cancer, may have provided a fine public service by reminding Americans to see their doctors and not postpone what can be valuable health screenings.

January 17, 2022

U.S. has hit blood crisis and donors needed urgently, Red Cross says

by Patrick A. Malone

It has no artificial replacement. Patients can require enormous amounts of it, suddenly and quickly, as well as on a sustained basis. But safe, abundant supplies of blood are desperately needed now, the Red Cross says, having declared what it says is its first-ever national crisis with the country facing its most dire shortages in a decade.

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted donations, which already were spare, says the nonprofit agency that collects 40% of the nation’s supply. In more regular times, just 3% of those who are eligible donate blood, and donations have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic started.

Demand, however, persists. As a selection of the agency’s reported statistics show:

November 12, 2021

Patients can’t escape reminders of U.S. health care’s brutal costs

by Patrick A. Malone

Soaring medical costs crush the finances of far too many patients, as the public was reminded by the release of an annual report on the high toll of cancer-care spending and a surprising congressional reverse aimed at reining in runaway prescription drug prices — or at least attempting to.

Leading organizations dealing with cancer treatment — including the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries — found that patients in 2019 (the most recent year data were available) “shouldered a whopping $21.09 billion in costs,” the Washington Post reported.

Patients and their loved ones get hit with major costs in the first year of disease diagnosis, as well as the highest expenses at the ill individuals’ end of life, the report found.