Settling for treatment
06, 04 10, 21:43 Filed in: Medical
I was talking to some of my neighbors today about IPT (Insulin Potentiated Therapy), and how it uses lower doses of chemotherapy with fewer side effects than conventional chemotherapy and may even produce better outcomes (though there’s not much research on it). One of them asked why more doctors aren’t learning how to do this. To me, the reason seems straightforward in our current medical system: there’s no economic incentive to do it.
In order to learn to do IPT, a doctor needs to take time off work to learn to do it. That means no income for that time (actually, losing money since overhead costs remains when the doctor isn’t working) without much potential for increased revenue after learning the treatment. Hospitals and offices make money from delivering chemotherapy by marking up the drugs they are giving in addition to charging for services. More chemo and higher priced chemo (recent cancer drugs cost 20-200 times more than older drugs and may not give any more substantial benefit) means more money to keep the offices open and funds to cover fancy new cancer clinics and free art therapy classes. So, using less drug (IPT typically uses 10% of the usual dose) or older drugs (a vial of an old medication can be as little as $15 where a vial of a newer drug like Topotecan costs nearly $2000 per vial and others cost more... remember that chemo may use multiple vials and costs to administer the drugs will add substantially to the price) would substantially reduce the revenues of these offices and hospitals.
With big organizations, money drives everything they do and a potential loss of income (switching from larger margin chemos to smaller amount of cheaper drugs) isn’t going to contribute to a healthy bottom line.
It is an unfortunate reality that in this country there’s more interest in doing more expensive procedures than a less expensive procedure that may perform better.
In order to learn to do IPT, a doctor needs to take time off work to learn to do it. That means no income for that time (actually, losing money since overhead costs remains when the doctor isn’t working) without much potential for increased revenue after learning the treatment. Hospitals and offices make money from delivering chemotherapy by marking up the drugs they are giving in addition to charging for services. More chemo and higher priced chemo (recent cancer drugs cost 20-200 times more than older drugs and may not give any more substantial benefit) means more money to keep the offices open and funds to cover fancy new cancer clinics and free art therapy classes. So, using less drug (IPT typically uses 10% of the usual dose) or older drugs (a vial of an old medication can be as little as $15 where a vial of a newer drug like Topotecan costs nearly $2000 per vial and others cost more... remember that chemo may use multiple vials and costs to administer the drugs will add substantially to the price) would substantially reduce the revenues of these offices and hospitals.
With big organizations, money drives everything they do and a potential loss of income (switching from larger margin chemos to smaller amount of cheaper drugs) isn’t going to contribute to a healthy bottom line.
It is an unfortunate reality that in this country there’s more interest in doing more expensive procedures than a less expensive procedure that may perform better.
