Tonight at 8:00pm and 11:00pm EST on the Fox Businesses Channel, John Stossel, host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network, will discuss the issue of who should control what people put into their body, and in what sense people are free to decide what medicines they should take. In his opinion, “people suffer and die because the government "protects" us.” Accordingly, he believes that the government “should protect us less and respect our liberty more.”
On his program tonight he will speak with Bruce Tower, who is currently living with prostate cancer. Mr. Tower “wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it.” He was told by “one bureaucrat that the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects.”
Mr. Tower was outraged by such comments, and said “who cares about side effects?” As a terminally ill patient, who has experienced various treatments and suffered from side effects, he asserted that it should be his option to endure any side effects. Stossel agreed with this opinion that it “should be his option.” The talk show host was further frustrated by the fact that “Americans seem to stand aside and let the state limit their choices, even when people are dying.”
The show will also highlight Dr. Alan Chow, who invented a retinal implant that helps some blind people see (optobionics.com). It took him seven years and cost $50 million dollars of FDA-approved tests to develop it, “but now the FDA wants still more tests.” Dr. Chow however, does not have the additional $100 million needed, and the third stage will take another three years. He is also faced with problems raising money from “investors because the implant only helps some blind people, and investors fear there are too few customers to justify their $100 million risk.”
As a result, patients like “Stephen Lonegan, who has a degenerative eye disease that might be helped by the implant, can't have it,” and instead, he will go blind. Mr. Lonegan asserted that he does not “want to be made safe by the FDA” and he would rather be able to see Dr. Chow “and make the decision himself.”
Stossel will use these cases to confront Terry Toigo of the FDA, who believes these “restrictions are necessary to protect the integrity of the government's safety review process.” He asked Toigo why the FDA had to be involved, and why people could not just try things. She replied, "We don't think that's the best system for patients, to enable people to just take whatever they want with little information available about a drug."
Stossel believed that preventing patients from choosing causes “people to suffer and die when they might have lived longer, more comfortable lives.”
His program will also focus on the “Drug Enforcement Agency's war on drug dealers,” which has led them to watch pain-management doctors like hawks.” He asserts that such watching scares “pain specialists into underprescribing painkillers, and as a result, sick people suffer horrible pain needlessly.”
Ultimately, Stossel correctly acknowledges that because we live in a free country, and all drugs involve risk, “it should be up to individuals, once we're adults, to make our own choices about those risks.”
Important to our industry one segment of the program will feature a mini debate between Thomas Stossel, MD and Arnold Relman, MD on the topic of industry physician relationships.
The show will air at 8pm and 11pm EST on Fox Business Network, be sure to tune in.
I suffer from fibromyalgia and have sever neck and back pain. I am under the care of a pain management doctor, neurologist and primary care doctor. My pain medication is in such such low doses it only takes the edge of the back and neck pain I suffer from to say nothing of the fibromyalgia pain.
I have come to terms to living with pain. The general attitude I have encountered in the medical community in dealing with pain is apathy. I have to wonder how much of that attitude is the result of DEA standards. Patients should not be made to feel that they have no choice or that going to a doctor is pointless when they are in pain but that is what these policies are doing.
It is not government job to protect me from myself. People who are incapable of making their own decisions are another matter and there are provisions to deal with them but don’t legislate base on the minority. That is just bad legislation.