The biggest exception is oncology. Since everyone knows that chemotherapy is hell, cancer drugs tend to get a pass and pre-approval companies are (slightly) more willing to work with compassionate use exemptions.

This is done for targeted advertising all the time. Frustratingly, the surveillance capitalism industry is precisely the reason the dataset you'd need probably shouldn't exist.

Maybe we'll get some decent lawmakers sometime soon, and problems like that will be fixed via legislation. They'd need to ban the root-cause of the problem. I'm guessing it's more likely the current congress will let private companies steal + sell everyone's info instead.

You're right about the specificity - Hep C is a bigger-population target than a lot of cancers are - but a lot of the new approaches are looking to be inherently more "personalized" to compensate.

Long answer, it's a variable you need to consider when doing data analysis, and it depends on what exactly you're talking about, but it's absolutely not true for improvements in cancer survival general. One alternative method is to look at per-capita death rates, for example:

Reduction in US and UK childhood cancer death since 2000 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-chi...

Reduction in several countries' age-standardized breast cancer death since 2000 (Why did it increase in South Africa? I'm not sure, maybe socioeconomic factors) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/breast-cancer-death-rate-...

Reduction in global age-standardized cancer death rate since 2000 (Scroll down to second graph. Since the population is getting older, age-standardization makes a fairer comparison) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates

2000 is an arbitrary year I picked for clear visual changes without needing to haggle over statistics. If you want to feel optimistic, switch the childhood cancer death graph to 1960-now.

This method has different possible failure points. It could be that less people are getting cancer, or that people who would get cancer are dying of other causes, or reporting of cause of death has changed, though this is very unlikely for some figures, such as leukemia death rates for children in the US. Statistics is hard. Overall though, the evidence is very good that cancer survival has improved a lot due to better treatments since 2000.

If you have a more specific claim you're dubious about, I'd be willing to look into it for you. I'm very enthusiastic about this topic.

A friend of mine, aged 50, has worked in pediatric oncology her entire (nursing) career. The ratio of surviving kids has flipped from 30/70 to 70/30 during her tenure.

Another way to come at it would be mortality data. But that has a bunch of its own problems.

Everything is changing at once, it makes this kind of science so hard.

>CASE 4B Case Overview Mrs. B was a female in her 80s who had a challenging medical trajectory following coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. She experienced several post-operative sequelae, including wound dehiscence, osteomyelitis, and respiratory failure. She required specialized care in hospital, including additional surgical procedures. Due to physical and functional decline, Mrs. B elected for a palliative approach to care. She was discharged home with palliative supports (i.e., palliative care team and home care support services, including adaptive aids and personal support services). Mrs. B reportedly expressed her desire for MAiD to her family. In response, and on the same day, her spouse contacted a referral service on her behalf. The following day, a MAiD practitioner assessed her for MAiD eligibility. She reportedly told the MAiD assessor that she wanted to withdraw her request, citing personal and religious values and beliefs. She communicated that pursuing in-patient palliative care/hospice care and palliative sedation was more in-keeping with her end-of-life goals. The next morning, Mrs. B presented to the emergency department (ED) of her local hospital. Her spouse was noted to be experiencing caregiver burnout. Mrs. B was assessed to be in stable condition, and thereby discharged home with continued palliative care. Her palliative care physician completed a referral for in-patient palliative care / hospice care due to her social circumstances (i.e., caregiver burnout). Her request was denied for not meeting hospice criteria for end-of-life, and a long-term care application was offered.

On the same day, Mrs. B’s spouse contacted the provincial MAiD coordination service requesting an urgent assessment. A different MAiD assessor from the previous day completed a primary assessment and determined Mrs. B to be eligible for MAiD. The former MAiD practitioner was contacted. This MAiD practitioner expressed concerns regarding the necessity for ‘urgency’ and shared belief for the need for more comprehensive evaluation, the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e., due to caregiver burnout). The initial MAiD practitioner requested an opportunity to visit with Mrs. B the following day to re-assess; however, this opportunity was declined by the MAiD provider due to their clinical opinion that the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision. An additional MAiD practitioner was arranged by the MAiD coordination service to complete a virtual assessment. Mrs. B was found eligible for MAiD by this third assessor. The provision of MAiD was completed later that evening.

Even if you're buying time with every trial, all you've done is turn the patient into a lab rat for physicians to play around with. The ideal patient needs to be dead enough to have no human rights, but alive enough to participate in the trial. The hope of a miracle cure means the patient doesn't believe himself to be dead enough to not have human rights anymore. It's a paradox.

Signing the documents for such a trial is equivalent to signing your consent for euthanasia. It shifts the blame of death from the cancer to the company performing the trial. It's an extended form of organ donations where you donate your entire body while you're still alive.

The government is responsible for funding every aspect of this process, though. It regulates the controls and rubrics over who gets what kind of care. The husband may have instigated it, but the system is broken if a person eligible for euthanasia isn't eligible for palliative care or hospice.

Most importantly, I continue to contend that MAID is turning into something that isn't what Canadians voted for. It is, however, turning into something that its opponents feared might come to pass.

Separately, why do these services have to move so quickly? It seems like it’s either glacially slow in other countries where people pass before even finishing the paperwork, or insanely fast like in this case. There really should be a balance.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/joining-cancer-trial...

After all, using the monopoly power of government and taxation is meant to be more efficient and provide more services at lower costs.

A cynical person might presume that MAID is being used as a cost savings measure more than an empathetic alternative for those who do not wish to wait to die of natural causes.

Are the headlines the tip of the iceberg, or the exceptions that gain notoriety? When the government and health care system are so deeply intertwined, who has access to the data but not an incentive to obscure the facts? With any luck, time will tell.