Patients want to be offered New Oncology Drugs
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Publisher: AAP NewsWire
Publication: AAP Australian General News (Wed 11 Jun 2008 1:47 PM)
Keywords: Pharmaceutical (1),Benefits (1),Scheme (1),PBS (1)
Edition: Both Cycles
FED: Tell cancer patients about expensive drugs, doctors told
By Tamara McLean, Medical Writer
SYDNEY, June 11 AAP - Australians with terminal cancer want doctors to tell them about budget-blowing drugs that could add a few months to their life, even if they cannot afford to take them.
A recent survey showed that more than 40 per cent of cancer specialists do not tell their patients about new unsubsidised drug treatments, most of which cost at least $5,000 a month.
The information is withheld often for fear of distressing sick people about options financially out of their reach.
But a new Australian study has found that more than 90 per cent of people would want to be informed, even though only 50 per cent said they would be willing or able to pay for the drugs.
"The message is that people want to know more than perhaps we realised they do," said study leader, Dr Linda Mileshkin, a medical oncologist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
"It can be a hard issue for doctors, a blurry line, but this should make it clearer."
Many of the new targeted anti-cancer therapies show promise for improving quality of life and extending survival in early trials, often years before they are made cheaply available under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
Some, like the breast cancer drugs Herceptin and Tykerb, were costing patients up to $60,000 for a annual course before they won subsidies.
Others like Avastin and Erbitux, used to treat a range of cancers, are still only subsidised for some indications.
Researchers asked 1,225 healthy people whether they would want to be informed about a $25,000 drug that could add four to six months to their life had they been diagnosed with incurable cancer.
Only nine per cent said they would not want to know.
Cancer Council Australia chief executive Professor Ian Olver said a doctor's decision to withhold drug information from patients was "compassionate but ill-directed".
"If you're going to promote a system of informed choice then you must inform a patient that a treatment like that exists, even if your health system won't provide it free for them," Prof Olver said.
"It's not up to us to second guess how a patient will react to the information and, frankly, we don't always know the full financial circumstances of our patients anyway."
He said patients had been known to go to extreme lengths, such as community fundraising, mortgaging their home or politically advocating to get the drug funded, in order to get the treatment.
The independent research was presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago this month.
AAP tam/maur/cdh
Headline: FED: Tell cancer patients about expensive drugs, doctors told
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