the cost of prolonging life
By Mike Ashworth | June 17, 2009
I have just been watching a programme on BBC2 titled “The Price of Life“. It focussed on a particular drug, Revlimid, which it is claimed can prolong the life of terminally ill people perhaps by 12 months. It costs on average about £50,000 for a 12 month period.
From my own perspective if I were terminally ill I would not want the NHS to spend this amount of money on prolonging my life, at the end of 12 months you are not cured, you are still dead.
It is a fact that we are all going to die one day, however much we may think we’ll live forever. I feel that these sums of money would be better spent on dealing with the “how we die” not the “when we die”. The provision of hospice care and Macmillan nurses etc would be a far better place for this money to be spent.
My father died of Alzheimers and this was a painful thing to watch. This is a different disease that the one talked about in the program however I feel that if he had been suffering from Cancer, the dignity in his final years would have been far more important than prolonging the moment when he was taken from us.
Of course if people do want cheap pharmaceuticals perhaps it is time for laws to be proposed that makes the drug companies into Social Enterprises, so they are not focussed on generating as much money as possible for the pills they manufacture.
Topics: Health |
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