Rise in cancer drug costs

What is sobering about this booming business is that, as a group of oncologists wrote earlier this year, “most anti-cancer drugs provide minor survival benefits, if at all.” They often (but not always) reduce the size of inoperable tumors, but they rarely eradicate the disease. For relatively uncommon malignancies like testicular cancer, some forms of leukemia, and lymphoma, drugs effectively cure the disease; for the common “solid tumor” cancers (lung, breast, colon, prostate, and so on), which account for the vast majority of annual cases, drugs buy some time—precious time, to be sure, but time usually measured in weeks and months rather than years. And even though many of the newer drugs are less toxic, they often still have to be given with older drugs whose side effects include nausea, hair loss, fatigue, and decreasing blood counts. One anti-cancer drug produces a skin rash so severe and disturbing, according to Saltz, that some patients have been asked by employers not to come to work.

And it’s not just that the price of cancer drugs has doubled in the last decade—it’s that the rise in prices, according to cancer doctors, has far exceeded the drugs’ effectiveness. In 1994, the median survival rate for someone with advanced colon cancer was eleven months, according to Saltz, and the lifetime costs of the drugs used to treat the average patient would be about $500 at today’s prices. By 2004, the median survival rate had increased twofold, to 22 months, but Saltz says the drug costs had increased hundreds of times for that extra eleven months.-link

Rising costs of cancer drugs are becoming problematic, and the increase in effectiveness hasn't been up to par with the increase in costs. Though for a kinds of cancer they've proven highly effective.

Some anesthetics impair memory even while still conscious

When a high enough dose of an anesthetic agent is administered, information from the outside world is not processed by the patient and, thus, no conscious memories are formed. In this sense, all anesthetic agents are amnesic at a certain dose. Subsequently it became known that benzodiazepines at lighter levels of sedation also produced a lack of later recall. This was the first group of drugs to exemplify the difference of amnesia from sedation. The term ‘conscious amnesia’ is thus a more appropriate description of this drug effect. Our work has demonstrated that propofol produced virtually identical conscious amnesia as the benzodiazepine midazolam. Characteristics of conscious amnesia included relatively minor sedation, apparently normal cognition, and most notably, a lack of memory for events occurring when effective concentrations of propofol or midazolam were present. Conscious memory is also referred to as explicit or episodic memory, and is characterized by recollection of events or items within a context of time and place.-link

The drug versed(midazolam) and propofol, can cause conscious amnesia.   Some people would rather have bad memories than no memory at all, and if these are given for surgical procedures the gap in time created in memory can be distressing and even traumatic.