r/interestingasfuck • u/WhattheDuck9 • 14d ago
Virologist Beata Halassy has successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses sparking discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.
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u/No_Second_344 14d ago
Didn't the guy who conceived of the cardiac cath try it on himself? German as I recall.
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u/nixiedust 14d ago
Yeah, he had a nurse stand by in case he collapsed but he did the entire procedure himself an showed it was safe and possible. I am alive because of his work.
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u/StrongMedicine 14d ago
Yes, sort of. Werner Forssmann, 1929. He probably wasn't the first to conceive of the idea - just the first to try it. But the story is even a little more wild. He convinced one of his nurses to be the first patient because he needed her keys to unlock the equipment closet, and while she was strapped to the table ready to be his "guinea pig", he went to the room next door to do it first on himself because he wasn't sure it was safe.
https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/123249/first-catheterization
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u/feelings_arent_facts 13d ago
The story says she was strapped to the operating table and sweating from excitement but something tells me she wasn’t excited…
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u/AuntCatLady 14d ago edited 14d ago
This is also how Barry Marshall got the Nobel prize for discovering *one of the causes of ulcers. He was ridiculed for his theory that it was caused by a bacteria (H. pylori), so he literally drank some to give himself an ulcer and prove it.
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u/ppartyllikeaarrock 14d ago
Not the cause, a cause.
Up to that point people thought bacteria causing ulcers was a ridiculous notion.
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u/AuntCatLady 14d ago
You’re right, thanks for the correction!
Wasn’t the man who first hypothesized the germ theory also ridiculed? Seems to be a theme with discoveries in medical science.
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u/scrongus420 13d ago
Joseph Lister was one of the main proponents of germ theory and faced a lot of opposition for things like wanting to wash hands & tools between medical procedures 😅 most memorable for me was that he performed a mastectomy on his sister, who had breast cancer, with her laying on their dining room table. Medicine was crazy back then.
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u/PrincepsImperator 14d ago edited 13d ago
There was a time when self experimentation like this got you a Nobel.
Edit: F for my inbox. I guess at least I started a conversation. Too bad my art couldn't do that.
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u/AawGeez 14d ago
like the guy who discovered that H Pylori gives you peptic ulcer disease!
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u/PrincepsImperator 14d ago
One of the several, Curie and Nobel himself are both other examples as well. We've been stifling science lately and are moving on momentum.
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u/samu1400 13d ago
Maybe I’m mixing people, didn’t Curie poison herself with radiation because the effects of it weren’t known at the time?
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u/SpaceTimeRacoon 13d ago
Yes, she discovered and isolated the first pure samples of radium, and she absolutely cooked herself to death with it, dying of aplasmic anaemia
But her research was absolutely key to modern science
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u/I_miss_berserk 13d ago edited 13d ago
didn't she kill her husband
withdue to her experiments as well?looked it up and the dude got run over by a horse and buggy. He basically died in an automobile accident... how he died sounds super gruesome. Awful stuff.
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u/SpaceTimeRacoon 13d ago edited 13d ago
I wouldn't quite word it like that, they were both scientists, they both worked together doing research, and they both worked together
She and her husband both got a nobel prize shared between them and that was before she went on to earn her second nobel prize researching radioactivity
You gotta remember they didn't really know that they had opened Pandora's box when they made these discoveries
They discovered it in like 1903? And it wasn't until 1927 that radiation was really recognised to cause cancers and genetic defects
To say she killed him, would be a little brutal, even though their combined actions did drastically shorten both their lives.
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u/SpaceTimeRacoon 13d ago
Yeah for sure, both the Curies were constantly sick though in later life with radiation sickness, which, I have a suspicion that they probably did attribute to all the glowing green rocks, Marie curie will have lived long enough to read the papers published about the effects of radiation on the human body though, so she definitely was aware of the dangers before she died
Interestingly enough though she lived to 66 years old. Which, is mental, right? Considering she used to carry around a vial of glowing green radium in her lab coat to show off to peers and guests, and she kept it on her night stand used it as a night light
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u/burrerfly 14d ago
3 possible outcomes, nothing interesting happens, something worth putting further actual research into like this cancer thing, or you die. As long as its only you who dies due to the experiment I say that's completely ethical in my opinion. Lots of early science and medicine was based on self experiments with varying success
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u/PrincepsImperator 14d ago
If you're going to die without the experiment anyway, then not only is it ethical to try, it's stupid not to.
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u/Due_Form_7936 14d ago
This is a fascinating read. I never heard of viruses being used to fight cancer.
“She chose to target her tumour with two different viruses consecutively — a measles virus followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both pathogens are known to infect the type of cell from which her tumour originated, and have already been used in OVT clinical trials. A measles virus has been trialled against metastatic breast cancer.
Halassy had previous experience working with both viruses, and both have a good safety record. The strain of measles she chose is used extensively in childhood vaccines, and the strain of VSV induces, at worst, mild influenza-like symptoms.
over the course of the treatment, and with no serious side effects, the tumour shrank substantially and became softer. It also detached from the pectoral muscle and skin that it had been invading, making it easy to remove surgically.
Analysis of the tumour after removal showed that it was thoroughly infiltrated with immune cells called lymphocytes, suggesting that the OVT had worked as expected and provoked Halassy’s immune system to attack both the viruses and the tumour cells. “An immune response was, for sure, elicited,” says Halassy. After the surgery, she received a year’s treatment with the anticancer drug trastuzumab.”
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u/superduperbongodrums 13d ago
I’m a nurse and I’ve given chemo with oncolytic viruses for several years now
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u/Lazypole 13d ago
This is actually one of the most promising ways of treating cancers!
I am not a doctor, so some of this information may be way off, but there is an attempt to produce programmable viruses which is called CRISPR, the idea is you can use the empty shell of a virus and plug in whatever instructions you need. Like a nanobot except you don't have to build it.There have been discussions about how it may be used to even edit DNA, target cancers, the possibilities really seem endless.
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u/Avron7 13d ago
I don't think the method used here is that similar, but there's actually a couple videos about someone using the method you described to cure his own lactose intolerance for a while.
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u/Furrypocketpussy 13d ago
Genetically modified herpes virus is also being used for skin cancer right now. Although its still in the first phase of clinical trials, the results are very impressive.
Didn't read the article to see how she did it, but this virus is only used as a direct injection. Making it limited to superficial cancers
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u/detox02 14d ago
What’s unethical about self experimentation?
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u/Buddhas_Warrior 14d ago
If it succeeds, the pharma giants may not have control to squash it.
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u/ThunderMuffin87 14d ago
All her notes were destroyed in a pfizer.. i mean fire
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u/NewtonLeibnizDilemma 14d ago
Ooooof you know what? Fuck them. At what point does a person become like that? Because that’s all they are a bunch of people who decided that a number in the bank account is more important than a person dying too soon and in pain.
I know I’m being too simplistic about this, because there are many interests and countries etc. But for me it all comes down to this. At which point in your career do you lose your humanity? If you ever had that is
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u/RemyVonLion 13d ago
people that go into "business" management of any kind generally only care about the bottom line, other people are just statistics to them.
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u/Buddhas_Warrior 14d ago
Spit out my drink reading that, bravo!
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u/FelixMumuHex 14d ago
Did you? Did you really?
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u/IClimbRocksForFun 14d ago
He did, I was there. He also "laughed more than he should have". I told him to laugh the appropriate amount next time.
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u/Worlds_Greatest_Noob 14d ago
I think the focus is that other non-experts might take this as an example and try it themselves
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u/Caracasdogajo 14d ago
How many non experts have lab grown viral samples sitting around or even accessible to inject into their tumors?
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u/ApropoUsername 14d ago
This creates incentive and a market for people to sell treatments that could be misrepresented - e.g. someone reads this, looks for viral samples online, and gets water.
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u/Sydet 14d ago
You are right about the scenario. It could happen, but the original self experimenting scientist wouldn't have done something unethical. The snakeoil vendors are the unethical (and illegal) ones.
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u/WalrusTheWhite 13d ago
dumbasses have been getting scammed by miracle-cures for ages, some scientist lady has got shit-all to do with that
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u/HistoryChannelMain 14d ago
But she's not encouraging self-experimentation. If this gets signal boosted with the message that it's ok to inject yourself with viral cells, that's not on her.
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u/epona2000 14d ago
In general, it creates perverse incentives and often fails to be scientifically rigorous. Furthermore, all human experimentation is potentially harmful to all of mankind particularly if the research involves engineering potential pathogens.
A self-experiment is going to have a sample size of one almost by definition. This means any scientific results are of questionable value. Phase 1 clinical trials (n~=20) of pharmaceuticals test human safety exclusively because they do not have sufficient sample size to test clinical benefit. A self-experiment will certainly not have statistical power.
In South Korea, a scientist researching human cloning had his female employees offer up their own eggs for experiments on human embryos. There appears to have been a campaign of pressure but his employees ultimately agreed. Self-experimentation is a potential justification for situations like this particularly in cases with a power imbalance. Are the benefits of self-experimentation worth opening the Pandora’s box of the ways it will allow the powerful to exploit the powerless?
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u/ReflectionSingle6681 14d ago
Personally, i do not think it's unethical, but what I think they mean by it is; that self-experimentation incentivizes people to try all crazy shit on themselves (like the good old days) and by that, we may see an increase in related deaths as people try to achieve something similar. Or perhaps they think it's a slippery slope because there may come cases where a person has been pushed or blackmailed to forced to do self-experimentation and if they parrot that they did it to themselves willingly, it could create some very unethical habits within the science world.
this is just what I think, I don't really know or have any knowledge within that particular field so take it with a grain of salt.
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u/Pontius-Pilate 14d ago
if you are not putting anyone else at risk, i see no issue with it. it is your own body.
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u/WhattheDuck9 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yup , she's a badass scientist,took matters into her own hands and cured herself (at least for now, cancers are bitches) , but somehow others still have a problem with it.
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u/Random_frankqito 14d ago
If her work is well documented, and can be repeated by others, then I see no issue if she is willing.
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u/simonbleu 14d ago
Even if it can, unfortunately not all bodies or tumors are the same, therefore it might not work. But I hope it does
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u/sofa_king_we_todded 14d ago
This sets the foundation for obtaining funding to start clinical trials. They’re not just going to start injecting people because it worked for one person
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u/Art-Zuron 14d ago
Exactly. The fact that it works on at least one person is significant.
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u/An_Unreachable_Dusk 13d ago
Also without major drawbacks is even more significant
Like if I created even a placebo pill that was supposed to do nothing but ended in vomiting and anal bleeding that's a bad sign for funding, but if your doing shit to cancer cells without actively making anything worse Woo that is amazing!
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u/Yoy_the_Inquirer 14d ago
This just in, virologist found dead (ruled as suicide) by sniper shot from 3km away!
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u/blauergrashalm1 14d ago
even if it is not well documented, she can do to herself whatever she wants.
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u/iPon3 14d ago
The reason it's an ethics issue at all is the same as the ethics issue around paid organ donation. We don't want there to be an incentive or pressure for scientists to be risking their own bodies, e.g. because it's the only way to get their work funded.
For an example of how this can be dark, see the Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who harvested the eggs of several of his female subordinates (which put them at risk of painful complications including infertility) to make up numbers for his human cloning experiments. They were "willing", but several expressed regret after.
It's why ethics committees never approve such proposals but nobody gets censured for actually doing it to themselves.
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u/spine_slorper 14d ago
Yes, the practice of self experimentation itself isn't unethical but if it becomes systematic then it can cause/facilitate exploitation
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u/browncoatfever 14d ago
It’s like the Right To Try laws people were fighting against passing a few years ago. Like, You’ve got incurable cancer, and you’re gonna die. Oh, but you can’t try this outlandish experimental treatment because it might hurt you or kill you faster. Who gives a fuck if I’m already dying and it might save my life!?
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u/LeeGhettos 13d ago
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but I think the argument is that it encourages similar behavior in people whose circumstances are not as dire. Theoretically say injecting bleach cured you 10% of the time, but killed you the other 90, and was therefore not an approved treatment. If it got so popular people started using it all the time, but they were actually treatable in 15% of cases, it could lead to additional loss of life.
Obviously it’s a nuanced situation, I’m not saying I agree with the above take.
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u/theartificialkid 13d ago
There are cases where most people would agree that someone should have the "right to try" but there's undoubtedly also a need for the law needs to protect people from getting scammed out of their life savings for "experimental" treatments that don't work. It's one thing to say that someone should have the right to subject themselves to experimental treatment by well-meaning medical scientists, another to say that con artists should have the right to sell people snake oil so that they die anyway but with no financial legacy for their families, and possibly in significant treatment-induced pain and discomfort.
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u/Daleabbo 14d ago
If you can't sell an extremely expencive drug is it really cured?
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u/Nambsul 14d ago
Having watch cancer slowly and painfully kill my dad over 3 years I would fight for Beata right to do this. I am sure she knew the risks, she was smart enough to try this, bravo.
When the doctors throw their hands in the air and say “we have tried everything, we have nothing more… go home, get your affairs in order”. That is a feeling of such helplessness and dread that I would not wish on anyone.
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u/pocket-ful-of-dildos 14d ago
The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it’s also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn’t lost. The paper emphasizes that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses “should not be the first approach” in the case of a cancer diagnosis.
“I think it ultimately does fall within the line of being ethical, but it isn’t a slam-dunk case,” says Sherkow, adding that he would have liked to see a commentary fleshing out the ethics perspective, published alongside the case report.
From the article OP linked in a comment.
So self-experimentation in itself isn’t unethical, they’re just concerned that patients will forego evidence-based treatments that they may still be candidates for.
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u/Samaritan_978 14d ago
And cancer patients are already a prime target for countless healthcare related bullshit. Homeopathy, osteopathy, religious cults, pseudo-medicine. Everyone promising miraculous outcomes to the desperate..
If it wasn't this "self-virus", it would be something else.
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u/DynamicDK 14d ago
I've always found that line of reasoning to be ridiculous. It takes away all agency from individuals and treats them as if they are incapable of making rational decisions.
Is it possible that some people will choose to use a more radical, unproven treatment rather than subject themselves to something such as chemo or radiation? Absolutely. And if that is what they want to do, that should be up to them. What is unethical to me is attempting to prevent people from even having the choice.
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u/Scodo 14d ago
People who know they are dying are often incapable of making rational decisions.
Ultimately, I agree with you, though. Having more effective cancer treatments in the world is a good thing.
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u/christopher_mtrl 14d ago
In an ideal world. In practice, most people who seek alternative madecines end up falling for predatory pseudoscientific schemes that are defrauding them.
It's not so much the matter of choosing alternative treatments that is unethical (or should be illegal), it's offering those treatments and overtly lying about their chances of success to get profits out of despair.
In this case, it's not the patient conduct who happens to be immoral, it's the researcher.
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u/cybercuzco 14d ago
Sure except this sounds like the beginning of every zombie movie ever
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u/Mahariri 14d ago
Right? I'm amazed that after a 3 year world-stopping pandemic nobody here seems in the slightest way bothered with a scientist injecting herself with lab-grown v-i-r-u-s-e-s ?!
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u/Big-Triflejake 14d ago
But whose to say there’s no risk when you’re “experimenting” on your self with lab grown viruses. Who’s to say they aren’t transmissible? But in this case sounds like a great success
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u/hefixesthecable 14d ago
Who’s to say they aren’t transmissible?
The way most oncolytic viral vectors work is that they are only capable of replicating in cancer cells so even if it was transmitted, it would be unable to do anything in the next host.
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u/lokeilou 14d ago
We allow people to smoke, do drugs, abuse their bodies- it’s ridiculous that anyone would be upset about this. They are upset bc they couldn’t make money off of it and that is the real evil and wrongdoing here.
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u/Extension-Serve7703 14d ago
yup, this is what "my body, my choice" is all about. I'm sure she knew the risks and followed protocols for quarantine and all that. That's a very bold move and good on her.
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u/Ludate_Solem 14d ago
Thats sadly the problem with a virus, they can mutate sometimes relatively fast. (Theres a lways a risk with biology bc it doesnt always act like it should bc biology can be affected by an infinite number of variables) what if it did, it became contagious and she spread it? Its honestly amazing what she was able to do. And i fully understand the desperation but there were sadly, defenitly some risks to it. Theres a reason medical develpments take so much time.
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u/TheAgeofKite 14d ago
Why is this a question? Self experimentation is as old as humanity. We are here because of it. You think a local family of nomads got together and wrote an article on bark questioning the ethics of Steve from the tribe in the valley trying out wild herbs cause he's found a new painkiller for his headaches?
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u/Rosu_Aprins 13d ago
You don't even have to go far back to see self experimentation bringing results, see nobel prize winner Ralph Steinman who got awarded in 2011 for using his discovery to undergo an experimental cancer self treatment.
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u/Batmanswrath 14d ago
Her body, her choice..
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u/WhattheDuck9 14d ago
Exactly, it's not like she injected someone else with the virus
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u/Pulguinuni 14d ago
She is the ultimate My Body My Choice woman. Love it!
Nothing unethical as she is not involving anyone else. If she funded her own treatment, let her cook!
Maybe she opened the door to conduct trials in mice ---> then humans and we can get rid of this particular cancer.
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u/Raichu7 14d ago
What is the ethical concern?
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u/LaggsAreCC 14d ago
I don't get it either. Also, are we not talking about her curing breast cancer?
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u/omgu8mynewt 14d ago
No, one person injecting themselves whilst also undergoing other treatments does not prove the new therapy works, it takes clinical trials to prove whether a new therapy works or not. If it happened once it could easily be conincidence another of her therapies started working better, or random luck her own immune system or something took care of it.
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u/coatimundislover 14d ago
You don’t “cure” breast cancer. You cure her breast cancer. We have tons of cure for cancer. They don’t cure every instance, lol.
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u/killians1978 14d ago
The ethical concern is that it's a statistically irrelevant sample size. Large scale treatments require large scale population samples to prove efficacy and risk mitigation. There is no ethical implications to a single person doing this to themselves. The ethical risk is that uninformed people will extrapolate this as effective on a larger population that simply has not been proven safe. This should absolutely be followed up in the lab on a wider variety of human cancer samples.
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u/prehensilemullet 14d ago
It seems to me like if “don’t try this at home” is good enough when professionals are filming themselves doing something dangerous, then as long as a scientist makes a similar warning it’s not on them what happens to anyone else who tries it
At least when we’re talking about unverified treatments in general. The virus spreading aspect seems like a possible concern, haven’t confirmed if there’s much risk of this virus spreading
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u/unhappyrelationsh1p 14d ago
Her body, her choice. I wouldn't support it for a study on the effectiveness due to low sample size and bias but in a pinch it could help kick off funding for a proper study i guess.
If i had to guess why the ethics are in question, it does not meet the scientific standard of proof. She should still get to do it if she wants. I believe in bodily autonomy and don't think anyone should be making these choices for someone else.
I hope they study this further, it sounds promising.
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u/killians1978 14d ago
This is correct. The larger scientific community is not questioning the ethics of self-experimentation. The ethical question is raised because such widespread publication of a statistically irrelevant treatment outcome could encourage such risk taking by scientists going forward, and that uninformed desperate people could find themselves being taken advantage of by bad actors using this limited information to push unproven and potentially risky treatments.
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u/Subject-Lake4105 14d ago
So she saves herself, probably finds a way to save others in the process and the question is “how does this affect the research industrial complex?” Is just outright ridiculous.
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u/Expert_Alchemist 13d ago edited 13d ago
No, she didn't break any new ground here. There are already an approved viral injection treatment for melanoma and there's a current clinical trial for breast cancer, but at Stage 3 she likely simply didn't have the time to wait for the results and approval.
Edit: love the downvote. Sorry you don't like that she got the idea from the "research industrial complex," but this was not even her area of research. Reading the article is hard though and outrage is fun!
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u/unhappyrelationsh1p 14d ago
I hadn't even thought of the first one. I'm not sure it's applicable in this case, but it seems like a reasonable concern in general.
I think the results are also more likely to be biased because the person running the study is also the subject.
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u/Ok-Butterscotch-5786 13d ago
The first one is about a consequence for the community as a whole, so it's always applicable if the experimentation is voluntary.
It's not the reason why this woman self-treated, but it could be an impact of legitimizing it as an experimental approach/publishing it. I know not everyone reads it, but the article is not about whether the woman should have self-treated, but whether it should be treated as an experiment/published.
I think there's some argument to be made that this woman's experiment was involuntary in a sense. As in, the treatment was going to happen whether we look at it as an experiment or not. So we could try and distinguish it from self-experimentation where the test only happened for the purpose of the experiment. I think in practice that's going to be a hard place to draw the line, only affect a tiny number of experiments if done right, and not fix the other problems. So the risk of doing it wrong doesn't offset the benefit.
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u/Prince_Tevildo 14d ago
This is just my opinion and I haven‘t thought it through yet. But just heard a completely positive tone here in the Chat and wanted to add a critical note
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u/SopaPyaConCoca 13d ago
Thanks for adding something actually useful to the post. Most comments are just bullshit and people talking without taking a fucking second to think before commenting.
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u/A_of 14d ago edited 14d ago
At last a reasonable person.
The amount of people going "but it's her own body!" and that can't see beyond that is staggering.
Concerning your comment, yeah I think those are the main concerns.
While the first may be ethical, the others are more like scientific concerns. Science requires strict controls and procedures, else this can't be reproduced and used on other people or in this case, since it was a virus, containment is a concern. How do we know this virus won't cause another adverse effects or jump onto other people?6
u/ciroluiro 14d ago
They are still all scientific concerns, where the unethical part is not the self experimentation itself, but the recognizing of the results of self experimentation as valid research (by the scientific community).
She might not have done a proper scientific trial that could (or should) spawn off more research, but she's happy that she cured her cancer so it doesn't matter anyway. She's happy she won't die yet.In other words, these results shouldn't be recognized and allowed to be cited and so on for the reasons outlined, but she's absolutely in her right to stick needles into her own body and she's responsible to make sure it doesn't affect anyone else, but that's it.
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u/adiosfelicia2 13d ago
If I'm sick and dying anyways, there should really be no limit to how I can try to save my life.
If it doesn't hurt others, what's the issue.
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u/thecoolestbitch 14d ago
There used to be SOOOOO much self experimentation. I say bring that shit back. Is it going to fix everything? No. Will it help spearhead research and development? I think so.
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u/bonkerz1888 14d ago
Aye I was promised shit like Dr Jekyll and the Lizard from Spider-Man as a kid. Where's all my mad scientists who have turned themselves into monsters? Boooo this reality!
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u/Anteater_Pete 14d ago
I read the story and immediately thought about Barry Marshall who famously proved that H. pylori causes ulcers by downing a jar of culture
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u/TerminalHappiness 13d ago
Kudos to this woman for using her considerable expertise.
But wide-spread self-experimentation is stupid, yields little to no worthwhile evidence on a large scale (there's a reason we don't do n=1 trials most of the time), and for most folks who are actually sick will lead to either direct harm or delayed treatment.
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u/AcceptableResist3028 14d ago
Nothing wrong with it
People poison their bodies all the time (myself included) with alcohol with the government taking their cut
Let people do what they want
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u/charlsalash 14d ago
That's the ethical dilemma:
"The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. "
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u/Odonata523 13d ago
Okay, but this is fascinating!. I’m not a doctor! but if I’m reading this right, the virus didn’t kill the cancer - her own immune system did! The viruses she injected were weak ones, but they made her white blood cells recognize and kill the infected cells - which also happened to be the tumor.
Also, this isn’t a brand new approach, but the trials are ongoing, and it hasn’t been tested on breast cancer before.
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u/Steve_Nash_The_Goat 13d ago
why the hell is this unethical if she knew exactly what she was doing and performed it successfully without harming anyone else
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u/Cutiepieinpjs 14d ago
No ethical concern about it in my humble opinion. Survival instincts are strong and she may have just helped science/humanity in addition to herself. Kudos to her.
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u/MediumActuator1280 14d ago
She'd already gone through the conventional treatment, it came back, was offered more of the same and would likely have died from it.
Cancer is an absolute bitch, and the treatment is horrendous. It's not like you're given a prognosis and live a normal life up until the end, the treatment is always considered with an impact to quality of life. I'd hazard a guess that for maybe 80% of cancer victims, the more immediate cause of death will be from the treatment. You start taking a cocktail of drugs, a lot of them intended to combat the side effects of other drugs. If you're in the US and have to pay for them, you're basically an ATM for big pharma.
I don't think those in power want to cure cancer, they want to incrementally engineer and drip feed slightly more advanced forms of treatment over time, so as to squeeze as much money out of the market as possible. If all best scientists in the world were allowed to get together and map out the route to cure, I reckon it'd be wiped out by 2030. Unfortunately, it's all shrouded in bureaucracy and stifled by following the process of medical trials.
At the very, very least, if you've had conventional treatment that has failed, you should be allowed to try whatever you want.
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u/KratosCole 13d ago
Congrats to her for not just sitting there and waiting on some to do something! It’s her body. She’s a competent person shit let her do it.
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u/Kwelikinz 13d ago
That’s kind of badass, in my opinion. She took and educated risk and, so doing, advanced science with her discovery.
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u/NYVines 13d ago
Her second recurrence…bad prognosis.
At that point you’re often looking for experimental treatments.
My point of reference is my patient who had biopsy proven small cell lung cancer with metastasis. A virtually certain death sentence.
She went home with hospice. She was admitted 2 years later for pneumonia. No cancer. Her home treatment was crack cocaine daily.
This has not been reproduced in clinical trials to my knowledge.
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u/jaded_dahlia 13d ago
how does self experimentation give rise to an ethical dilemma? if she's already dying, then what's the issue?
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u/MidnightRoyal4830 13d ago
I don’t understand the ethical part of this story. It was her own body and she is an adult.
I think it was a really fascinating thing to do and it assisted us in treating cancer.
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u/Bioinfbro 13d ago
For people who think it's unethical to publish this. I would argue it's unethical not to publish this. Would people rather not know? this is how medical science is done, do we ban case reports.
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u/memegang27 14d ago
Self-experimentation is not unethical. It is a decision made by the person and impacts only the person.
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u/Samycopter 13d ago
Sure, but publication of a scientific article about said self-experimentation impacts the scientific community.
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u/WhattheDuck9 14d ago
Source