Center Acting Director and Professor Dr. Leonard Fleck spoke earlier this month at a virtual symposium presented by University of Groningen in Groningen, Netherlands.
The event’s theme was “Barriers and future directions of personalized medicine: from the bench to the patients.” Dr. Fleck’s presentation was titled “Precision Medicine/Ethical Ambiguity: Rough Justice, Wicked Problems, fragmented Solidarity.” The symposium was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. As one of several keynote speakers, Dr. Fleck provided an ethicist perspective. Dr. Fleck has provided a summary of his presentation below.
Solidarity is a fundamental social value in many European countries, though its precise practical and theoretical meaning is disputed. In a health care context, solidarity means roughly equal access to effective health care for all. However, I argued that precision medicine represents a threat to solidarity. Precision medicine includes ninety targeted cancer therapies (mostly for metastatic cancer). The “targets” of these therapies are certain genetic features of a cancer, mutations responsible for “driving” that cancer’s expansion. These targeted therapies have prices of €100,000 (roughly 117,500 USD) to €150,000 (roughly 176,300 USD) annually or for a course of treatment. Our critical question: Must a commitment to solidarity mean that all these targeted cancer therapies are included in a benefit package guaranteed to all in the European Union, no matter the cost, no matter the degree of effectiveness? Such a commitment would imply that cancer was ethically special, rightfully commandeering unlimited resources. That in itself undermines solidarity. I offered multiple examples of how current and future dissemination of these drugs challenges a commitment to solidarity. An alternative is to fund more cancer prevention efforts. However, that too proves a threat to solidarity. Solidarity is too abstract a notion to address these challenges. We need instead the notion of “just solidarity.” We need to accept that we can only hope to achieve “rough justice” and “supple solidarity.” The precise practical meaning of these notions needs to be worked out through fair and inclusive processes of rational democratic deliberation, which is the real foundation of solidarity.
What kinds of challenges currently exist within precision medicine? This episode focuses specifically on targeted cancer therapies, featuring a discussion between Center Professor and Acting Director Dr. Len Fleck and College of Osteopathic Medicine student Stephanie Mackenzie. Dr. Fleck discusses ethics, economic, medical, and health policy issues related to these high-cost therapies. Additionally, he provides insight into how U.S. pricing models for these therapies compare with other countries.
This episode was produced and edited by Liz McDaniel in the Center for Ethics. Music: “While We Walk (2004)” by Antony Raijekov via Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Full episode transcript available.
About: No Easy Answers in Bioethics is a podcast series from the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences in the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Each month Center for Ethics faculty and their collaborators discuss their ongoing work and research across many areas of bioethics. Episodes are hosted by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is the former Associate Dean of Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In a recent Wall Street Journalopinion piece, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns,” he complained that curricula in medical schools “are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness.” He goes on to say, “A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize ‘social justice’ that is related to health care only tangentially.” Really? Only tangentially?
Readers will recall Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint, Michigan. She had discovered elevated lead levels in many of her pediatric patients. She could have “stayed in her lane,” provided chelation therapy, hoped for the best, and gone home for dinner. If this is what we would have taught her during her medical education, we would have been complicit in suborning a major injustice.
Dr. Hanna-Attisha did the necessary background research, discovered that public officials had switched the source of Flint’s drinking water to save money, which, in turn, resulted in lead being leached into the drinking water. She brought her case to the media and vigorously advocated (successfully) for correcting this health hazard. She did this for the sake of the children in Flint, many not yet born. This was not tangential to her role as a physician; this was integral and essential. This was a matter of social justice. This was part of her medical education in the College of Human Medicine.
The practice of medicine today is suffused with social justice challenges. As we explain to our first-year medical students, the clinic is not an island of “pure caring,” isolated from the injustices that are pervasive in our health care system and governing policies. Those injustices frequently seep into clinical practice through the hands of physicians who, no doubt, see themselves as just and caring practitioners. This may sound like hyperbole, but I ask you to consider the evidence.
For the past forty years the dominant demand in health policy has been for health care cost containment. I will remind the reader that last year in the United States we spent $3.65 trillion on health care, roughly 18% of our GDP, compared to 11% of GDP in most European nations. If we ask who is responsible for spending more than 70% of those dollars, the short answer is that physicians in the clinic are the responsible agents. Physicians decide whether a patient needs surgery, which drugs to prescribe, what diagnostic tests are necessary, how much home care is needed, and so on. Consequently, if a focal point is needed for controlling health care costs, it will be physicians.
Note that cost control can be a matter of justice or injustice. In either case, physicians will have to be mindful of the justice-relevant consequences of their diagnostic or therapeutic choices. In the 1990s a number of managed care plans used “at risk” reimbursement to elicit more cost-conscious physician clinical behavior. In some cases, as much as 30% of a physician’s income could be “at risk” if they ordered too many tests. They could also earn 30% bonuses if they were especially stingy in their use of tests. Patients knew nothing of these arrangements. Income risks and opportunities such as those could readily shape physician behavior in ways that were less than just. Whether physician judgment in these circumstances would be corrupted would depend upon whether in their medical education they had had the opportunity to reflect upon such future challenges (as opposed to thoughtlessly accepting such practices as “this is the way medicine is practiced today.”)
Putting physician income at risk to control costs related to patient care is crude and obvious. More problematic are the subtle and invisible ways in which physicians control costs justly or unjustly. For example, a patient demands an MRI to rule out brain cancer when a physician is medically certain these are tension headaches. But the physician authorizes the MRI because “insurance will pay.”
If thousands of physicians are indifferent to authorizing such unnecessary care, then the costs of health insurance to employers increase. For employers at the economic margins, that cost increase may mean dropping health insurance as a benefit, thereby adding those employees to the ranks of the uninsured. From the perspective of any individual physician, this is a very remote, invisible consequence of their decisions that creates an injustice. Medical students need to know this to practice medicine justly.
Other employers will change insurance coverage to reduce their costs. They will require their employees to accept insurance with $5000 front-end deductibles. Financially less well-off workers will deny themselves that unnecessary MRI (no injustice there), but they will also deny themselves medically necessary diagnostic procedures (sometimes with deadly consequences) by not even walking into a physician’s office. Why, physicians might ask, should they as physicians be responsible for those bad decisions by patients; there was nothing to diagnose in the examining room. But maybe there was something to diagnose in society? This is sounding a bit more like the situation in Flint. Non-physicians made cost control decisions but counted on physicians to see such decisions as “merely tangential” to the practice of medicine, nothing that should concern them.
Precision medicine has generated more than 90 FDA approved genetically-targeted cancer drugs with annual costs of more than $100,000. These drugs are used with patients with metastatic disease. The vast majority of these patients will gain no more than extra months of life from these drugs, not extra years (though clever media campaigns create a very different impression). For most workers, their health plan will require a 20-30% co-pay for these drugs, which is unaffordable for most workers. Financially well-off managers and executives will be able to afford those co-pays, which means that workers who could not afford the co-pays will have contributed through their premiums to subsidizing that other 70-80% for the well-off. Is that fair? Is that just?
Should physicians caring for these patients silently acquiesce to these insurance arrangements as “too tangential” to medical practice, too far removed from the clinic? Should we, as teachers of future physicians, also silently acquiesce so that more curricular time can be allocated to understanding the mechanisms of action of the next 90 FDA approved targeted cancer therapies? WWHAD: What Would Dr. Hanna-Attisha Do?
Leonard M. Fleck, PhD, is Acting Director and Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University.
Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, October 24, 2019. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.
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Center faculty members Dr. Len Fleck and Dr. Devan Stahl recently presented at the 20th annual American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) conference, held October 18-21 in Anaheim, CA.
Dr. Fleck presented on “Parsimonious Precision Medicine: Wicked Problems.” The phrase “precision medicine” refers to targeted cancer therapies and immunotherapies that are aimed at defeating metastatic cancers with specific genetic signatures. There are more than ninety such FDA approved therapies, all of which have costs of more than $100,000 per year with some costing as much as $475,000 (CAR-T cell therapies). To date, none are curative. On the contrary, for the vast majority of patients gains in life expectancy are measurable in weeks or months, not years. These results suggest that for a just and caring society with limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs, we ought to be more parsimonious in how we use these drugs and who we choose to treat.
The key point of the presentation was that whether we choose to be parsimonious in our use of targeted therapies or not, we will generate what the literature has come to describe as “wicked problems” (ethically, economically, and politically speaking). A “wicked” problem is essentially a problem for which every proposed solution (including doing nothing) generates even more problems that are equally, or more, challenging.
Dr. Stahl gave two panel presentations at ASBH this year. The first, “Theories of Identity and the Problem of Precedent Autonomy,” explored the ethical tensions that arise when patients in disordered states of consciousness appear to have current preferences that contradict their prior wishes. The panelists, including Dr. John Banja (Emory University) and Dr. Nancy Jecker (University of Washington), discussed the limits of philosophical analysis and theory regarding the status of precedent autonomy.
In her second presentation, Dr. Stahl was joined by Darian Goldin Stahl (Concordia University) and Dr. Jeffrey Bishop (Saint Louis University) to discuss their latest book Imaging and Imagining Illness, which explores the effect of medical imagining on patients and ways medical images can be transformed through art and philosophy.
Center Professor Len Fleck and Marleen Eijkholt, former Assistant Professor with the Center, recently presented at the 2018 International Bioethics Retreat, held in Paris, France on June 27-29. The conference has been sponsored by Cambridge University for the past eighteen years.
Dr. Fleck presented on “Personalized Medicine? Precision Medicine? What is Just Enough?” He addressed a question raised by Warwick Heale in an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Heale was writing about the use of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) cost-effectiveness methodology to make allocation decisions in health care. Heale identifies himself as a utilitarian. He generally wants to obtain the most medical good for a population group at the lowest cost. However, Heale notes that the use of this methodology is about averages for a population group. He wants to argue that if a population group cannot be treated cost-effectively with some very costly cancer drug, then it would be unjust to deny that drug to any individuals in that group whom we could identify before the fact who would benefit very significantly and cost-effectively from that drug. This has a certain intuitive moral reasonableness about it.
However, Fleck argued Heale’s proposal has some morally problematic aspects as well. He asked his audience to consider Laurel and Hardy. Both have the same medical problem; both would benefit from access to a certain costly drug. The quantity of the drug is administered on the basis of weight. It is clear that the drug is cost-effective for the average 70 kilogram person. Laurel weighs 57 kilograms. The drug is even more cost-effective for him. But Hardy weighs 90 kilograms; the drug would not be cost-effective if given to him. The logic of Heale’s position would require denying the drug to Hardy. This would strike most physicians (as well as most patients) as clearly unjust, especially if we were talking about a drug that was not absolutely scarce.
Heale wrote this paper to suggest a better approach to allocating money from the UK Conservative government’s Cancer Drug Fund, which was mostly without ethical moorings for several years. However, Fleck concluded that Heale’s proposal might effectively address the economic challenges faced by the Cancer Drug Fund while adding to the moral challenges intrinsic to the creation of the fund in the first place.
Dr. Eijkholt spoke on “Medicine’s Collusion with False Hope: False Hope Harm.” She proposed a new argument to think about interventions that are offered for consumer demands rather than for medical reasons: i.e. the False Hope Harm. She proposed that hope serves important functions in medicine. Hope can be “therapeutic” and important for patients to “self-identity as active agents.” However, in consumer medicine, like in much of the U.S. health care context, hope could also take on a different role. Scenarios like Jahi McMath and Charlie Gard make us wonder if hope can be harmful too. In fields like stem cell medicine or cancer treatment, where providers justify their support for medical interventions with “it will make them feel better,” we can also identify the risk of such harm. While one might argue that we should not deny anyone such hope in the face of emotionally vivid stories, Dr. Eijkholt argued that the profession has an obligation to avoid false hope harms.
At a recent health insurer conference, David Mitchell, president of Patients for Affordable Drugs, was quoted as saying, “The system is not working right, and it starts with drug companies setting the price. But everybody in the system is making more money on the higher retail price – PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers), insurers, doctors administering drugs in the office … It’s exacerbated down the supply chain.” Mitchell has multiple myeloma with drug costs of $400,000 per year.
In 2001, imatinib (Gleevec®) made the cover of Time magazine. Imatinib is used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Over 70% of patients treated with this drug were still alive after ten years. The cost of the drug in 2001 was $36,000 per year. By 2017, the cost of the drug had risen to $146,000. Nothing changed about the drug during that interval. Production costs were the same; no additional research was necessary. Patients, however, were economic captives. Greed works.
Human life is priceless. That was the theme of a pharmaceutical video ad from a couple years ago. The implicit theme was that if your friends and family were unwilling to pay $100,000 for a drug for an extra year of life, they were obviously heartless, unethical atheists. Recall the drug sofosbuvir for hepatitis C, the $1000 per pill drug. Gilead Sciences bought the drug for $11 billion from a small research company. Sales of the drug in year one came to $10.4 billion, thereby recouping the entire cost of its “research.” It cost $10 per pill to make the drug. Gilead could charge $100 per pill, which yields a profit of 900%. However, human life is priceless, so it is more ethical to make a profit of 9900%. Greed is clever.
Image description: an orange pill bottle is shown on its side with capsules spilling out onto a white surface. The capsules are transparent and filled with shredded U.S. currency. Image source: Lisa Yarost/Flickr Creative Commons.
More than 90 targeted cancer therapies have FDA approval with costs per year or per course of treatment from $100,000 to $250,000 or more. They treat metastatic cancer; none of them is curative, generally yielding gains in life expectancy measurable in months, not years. For example, palbociclib (Ibrance®) is used to treat hormone-receptor positive advanced breast cancer. In treatment-naïve patients the cost per Quality-Adjusted Life-Year (QALY) gained is $768,498, while in patients who failed earlier treatments the cost per QALY is $918,166. These are cost-effectiveness figures.
In the United States, an intervention is judged cost-effective below $100,000 per QALY. The National Institute for Health Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK initially refused to include palbociclib as a covered medication in the National Health Service, but reversed that decision after price concessions. Congress, however, is prevented by law from permitting the use of cost-effectiveness as a basis for excluding a drug from Medicare coverage. This law was a product of intense lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry in 2006 using as an “ethical argument” that no patient should be denied access to a safe and effective drug merely because of price. Medicare was also forbidden by law (same lobbying effort) from either dictating the price of a drug or using its 44 million covered lives to extract huge price discounts from pharmaceutical companies in the way European countries do. Greed is politically savvy.
Pharmaceutical companies claim massive research costs. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development claimed a successful cancer drug costs $2.6 billion. Dr. Jerry Avorn, faculty in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Harvard Medical School, has critically assessed that work and concluded a more honest number is about $650 million. These debates make it appear that enormous analytical accounting work goes into justifying the price of a drug. However, the Wall Street Journal (no apologist for left-wing anti-pharmaceutical rhetoric) reported how the price of Ibrance was initially set at $9,850 per month in 2015. A bunch of executives sat around a table, looked at what insurance companies were willing to pay for comparable cancer drugs, and set the price accordingly. Before that price was made public, these executives noted that the price of everolimus (Afinitor®) had just been raised by $1,300 per month ($14,350). They were concerned they had set the price too low. Greed fell short there.
Overall, however, greed is amply rewarded. Researchers Vinay Prasad and Sham Mailankody looked at ten cancer drugs with development costs of $9 billion. Those ten drugs have generated revenue of $67 billion thus far, with years remaining on their patents. Greed pays well.
Pharmaceutical companies have purchased expensive academic talent to justify the cost of their drugs, such as Precision Health Economics (PHE), founded by Tomas Philipson, Dana Goldman, and Darius Lakdawalla, all full professors at the University of Chicago or the University of Southern California. In one article, “The Long-Term Impact of Price Controls in Medicare Part D,” associates of PHE found that proposed price controls would reduce the life expectancy of the cohort born 1991-95 by two years. In addition, “We find that price controls would reduce lifetime welfare by $5.7 to $13.3 trillion for the US population born in 1949-2005.” (Moreno G et al.) Those are scary numbers, relative to which cost-effective numbers of hundreds of thousands of dollars for various cancer drugs are economic crumbs. PHE has been intensely criticized in one ProPublica essay. Greed is seductive.
It is hard to imagine Big Pharma being inundated with warm fuzzies from the general public. However, Big Pharma has millions of zealous adherents ready to mount the legislative barricades on their behalf. 83% of patient-advocacy organizations received funding from the pharmaceutical industry and 36% have an executive from one of these firms on their board. Efforts to control drug prices are denounced as rationing or as threats to further life-saving innovation. Further, these drug companies are perceived by patients as being generous and compassionate because they provide coupons worth thousands of dollars each to patients faced with high co-pays. If a patient needs a $65,000 drug and has an unaffordable co-pay of $15,000, it is good business sense to cover that $15,000 cost to obtain $50,000 from the insurance company for a drug costing $5000 to produce. Greed is compassionate (toward the insured).
Compassionate greed has become a political, economic, and ethical reality, perfectly congruent with the Gospel of Prosperity. Health and wealth will be yours if you have unshakeable faith in the innovative grace of Big Pharma and respect their God-given right to price drugs at heavenly prices. If you prefer not to pray at the altar of Big Pharma, consider sending a copy of this essay to your member of Congress.
Leonard M. Fleck, PhD, is a Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University.
Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, April 5, 2018. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.
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Center Professor Len Fleck, PhD, was a keynote speaker at the Great Lakes Biorepository Research Network (GLBRN) Annual Scientific Meeting, held at Beaumont Hospital-Royal Oak Campus on November 3. The title of Dr. Fleck’s presentation was “Precision Medicine, Ethical Ambiguity,” summarized below.
What is precision medicine? A short answer would be getting beyond “one size fits all” drug therapy, with all the side effects and misfits that implies (e.g. traditional chemotherapy). Instead, medicine would stratify patients with a specific disease, such as some cancer, into subgroups so that therapy could be tailored to the specific genetic features of their cancer. The overall goal is to maximize the beneficial effects of an available therapy for a specific patient, minimize debilitating or dangerous side effects, and save money for the health care system. How could there be ethical problems with goals such as that?
The most significant problem relates to health care justice, the fair distribution of access to the fruits of precision medicine. The basic problem is that these targeted cancer therapies are extraordinarily expensive. More than 70 of these cancer drugs have been approved by the FDA since 2000.
Cost: $70,000–$200,000+ for a course of treatment.
One form of combination therapy is priced at $86,000 per month.
Kymriah for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) is priced at $475,000 for a one-time treatment.
None of these drugs is curative.
Median gains in life expectancy for patients is measurable in weeks or months for the most part.
Several hundred more such drugs are in the pipeline.
Fojo and Grady have pointed out that these drugs yield incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) of several hundred thousand dollars to more than a million dollars per Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY).
Imatinib (Gleevec) was approved in 2001 for the treatment of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). It is extraordinarily effective for the 70% of these patients who have survived at least ten years beyond diagnosis. It was priced at $36,000 per year in 2001, and must be taken indefinitely. In 2016 imatinib was priced at $146,000, even though nothing at all changed with regard to the drug itself. Another drug, Iclusig, was priced at $120,000 for a year in 2015. In 2016 the price was raised to $200,000. We will pass over in stunned silence at the obvious ethical issues here.
As a society that seeks to be just and caring in meeting health care needs we struggle to identify the ethical norms that should govern access to these targeted cancer therapies. Keep in mind that these drugs are for metastatic cancer, almost always a terminal diagnosis. Consequently, we often appeal to inchoate (and problematic) ethical intuitions. We appeal to the “rule of rescue,” “last chance therapies,” “the pricelessness of human life,” and the “visibility of desperate patients,” all of which seem to generate an ethical obligation to fund access to these targeted therapies. Unfortunately, that obligation runs out of ethical steam once insurance runs out. In health care, our sense of obligation has evolved to select for money.
Some sad conclusions: (1) No moral theories or “compelling” moral arguments are going to yield clearly satisfactory ethical resolution to these allocation/ priority-setting challenges. Not just cancer counts (ethically speaking). (2) Ultimately, given limited resources (money) for meeting unlimited health care needs we will have to rely upon fair and legitimate processes of rational democratic deliberation constrained by relevant clinical evidence and broadly endorsed considered judgments of health care justice. (3) For the foreseeable future, precision medicine will remain infected with clinical uncertainty, ethical ambiguity, disingenuous politicking, and byzantine economic accounting (not to mention pharmaceutical philandering).
Center Professor Dr. Leonard Fleck recently gave a keynote address at the 2017 Pediatric Bioethics Day at Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, KY, held on September 20.
Titled “Just Caring: Health Reform, Cost Control, and the Fate of Children with Life-Altering Illnesses,” Dr. Fleck’s talk started out with a short string of cases related to children with life-altering illnesses. He brought up the Jimmy Kimmel case (recently born infant with hypoplastic left heart syndrome), in part because a very explicit connection was made with the House-approved repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He also brought up childhood cancer cases, some capable of being effectively addressed by contemporary medicine, others not capable of being effectively addressed but raising ethics issues related to cost/health care justice as well as unnecessary harms related to aggressive treatment.
Dr. Fleck painted a statistical picture of the very large problem of escalating health care costs in the U.S., primarily as background for better understanding the “big picture” behind the problem of health care justice. He introduced seven different conceptions of justice, which are all part of our everyday understanding of how resources ought to be distributed fairly. The basic question we are seeking to answer would be this: What are the just claims to limited health care resources for children who have a broad range of expensive health care needs, the outcomes of which might vary considerably and have significant uncertainty attached to them?
Dr. Fleck reviewed a few elements of the ACA that were directly relevant to the fate of children with life-altering illnesses. For example, what effect has Medicaid expansion had on these children in the different states? Or what effect has the pre-existing condition clause of the ACA had on children with life-altering illnesses (forbidding insurance companies from discriminating against such children, either as children or future possible adults)?
Dr. Fleck then critically examined the American Health Care Act as passed in the House, and then the Senate counterpart of that bill. He addressed what he saw as the key injustices in those bills, the biggest being that it would achieve cost control largely through practices that were forms of invisible rationing (something he has written about extensively). Likewise, Dr. Fleck assessed the implications of the contraction of Medicaid for children with life-altering illnesses. This included the corruption of protections for pre-existing conditions and the inadequacy of state-based “high risk” pools allegedly as adequate protection of the health care rights and needs of such children.
Finally, Dr. Fleck discussed precision medicine in relation to cancer in children, keeping in mind the very high cost of these targeted therapies and the limited (marginal) success that has largely been true, especially in relation to solid cancers. There has been a lot of half-truths and hyperbole in this regard. There are in fact many extremely costly drugs for children with a range of life-threatening problems: some very effective, some not. Dr. Fleck used examples such as hemophilia (especially Factor VIII resistant), Gaucher, cystic fibrosis, Pompe, Fabry, Duchenne, etc. In this connection Dr. Fleck wanted to tease out the ethical challenges: If we cannot afford or justify doing EVERYTHING medically possible for all these children, then how should priorities be justifiably set? What should be the role of rational democratic deliberation in addressing these justice-relevant issues? Is bedside rationing ever morally justifiable in these circumstances? If so, how would we distinguish just bedside rationing from unjust bedside rationing decisions?
Questions about end-of-life care are always vexing, but a recent article in U.S. News and World Report suggests that cancer patients continue to receive useless but harmful treatments at the end of life (Thompson, 2016). A new research study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO’s) annual meeting revealed that a big part of the problem comes from a lack of meaningful dialogue among physicians, patients, and family members. Indeed, in many cases, serious discussions never take place. Dr. Ronald Chen, a radiation oncologist at the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his colleagues examined de-identified claims data from patients younger than 65 with advanced cancer who died between 2007 and 2014 and were enrolled in Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plans. They found that nearly three-quarters of patients with a variety of advanced cancers received aggressive care within the last 30 days of life—a proportion that remains virtually unchanged even after the ASCO issued warnings to physicians about the harm of such treatments in 2012 (Begley, 2016). Unfortunately, these treatments are not only unlikely to help but can be quite harmful. Andrew Epstein, an ASCO palliative care expert, explains, “Much more often than not, these types of care at the end of life are not helpful, and they are emotionally and physically harmful for patients, and emotionally harmful to the patients’ loved ones” (Thompson, 2016).
Image description: an image of Rosie the Riveter is combined with a pink ribbon representing breast cancer awareness, and text that reads “we can do it.” Image source: Flickr user Beverly & Pack.
The ASCO’s “Choosing Wisely” guidelines encourage physicians not to perform invasive procedures or try last-ditch chemotherapy and radiation regimens when patients are already significantly debilitated and unlikely to benefit. But, although the ASCO has encouraged end-of-life discussions, experts on end-of-life care worry about evidence that most terminally ill patients don’t even know they are in their final days. A separate study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that only 7% of patients who had scans, knew their cancer was quickly progressing, and discussed their prognosis with a physician acknowledged that they likely had mere months to live. Physicians frequently used overly optimistic language, and patients did not press their physicians for more information or explanation. As Holly Prigerson, an expert on end-of-life care at Weill Cornell Medicine, suggested, oncologists are generally “very reluctant to put a number on how long patients to have live” (Epstein et al., 2016). This reluctance likely stems from a fear of being characterized as overly pessimistic or as giving up on patients too quickly. Thus, we are left with the question of what to do with the results of these two studies. Why are physicians and patients so reluctant to discuss end-of-life choices and care options?
I believe there are two primary issues at play here. First, there appears to be unwillingness on the part of physicians to broach difficult subjects. It is especially problematic that despite general professional agreement about the need for less aggressive end-of-life care physicians routinely fail to have frank discussions with patients and steer them toward appropriate palliative options. I surmise that part of what is going on here has to do with the difficulty of changing perspectives. Few physicians would voice disapproval for palliative care in theory, but it is difficult to give up the fight and focus only on palliation. The medical community wants to “beat” cancer, not admit defeat. The culture of cancer has been shaped by a warrior myth whereby giving up on a cure is unacceptable. The only acceptable response is to fight the cancer to the very end, even if that fight requires significant sacrifices. No doubt, cancer culture is fueled by the general public’s expectations as well (Page, 2015); but, since physicians ultimately control access to aggressive care, they must take a large share of responsibility for the warrior ethos. Physicians would have great social power if they presented a united front in favor of palliative care.
Image description: a screen shot of search engine results for “cancer warrior” shows a glimpse of the socially acceptable “warrior” culture.
But, it is not enough for physicians to endorse and openly encourage palliative care. Secondly, we must consider what rights and responsibilities patients have when faced with critical illness. Too much of the discussion about end-of-life care to date has focused exclusively on the rights of patients to seek last-ditch treatment options. There is less discussion about patients’ right to receive comprehensive hospice and palliative care, and there is absolutely no discussion about the responsibilities patients have when they exercise their rights. It seems obvious that patients have a right to understand their prognosis and make informed decisions, but what of their responsibilities? Patients have a concomitant responsibility to be informed consumers when they seek care in accordance with their individual capacities. Part of becoming an informed consumer is recognizing that there will come a time in life when modern medicine no longer has an answer. That time may be sooner or later than a patient anticipates, but it will assuredly come. Preparation for these decisions is a patient’s responsibility. I would argue that current social pressures on patients to be so-called warriors who give up everything for a cure—no matter how unlikely or far-fetched said cure is—both limit individual choice (Page, 2015) and simultaneously allow patients not to discharge their responsibilities as informed consumers.
Remedying current end-of-life care challenges requires changes in attitude and behavior on the part of physicians and patients. Physicians have a professional responsibility to educate themselves and to offer patients reasonable treatment options—options that will most likely be palliative rather than curative. But, patients also have a role. They have a responsibility to think about end-of-life decisions. As human beings, we know our time is inevitably finite. We have a responsibility to prepare for end-of-life choices in the same way that we make plans for dependents, write wills, and purchase life insurance. Now, we just have to find ways to change behavior. So, to start the discussion, I am asking, “How can we collectively speak out against the current cancer warrior culture and help physicians and patients appreciate their rights and responsibilities?” Hannah Giunta is an eighth year DO-PhD student at Michigan State University. She received her MPH in May 2015 and her philosophy PhD in May 2016. She is currently completing her medical school clerkships.
Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, July 7, 2016. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.
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Center Professor Emerita Dr. Margaret Holmes-Rovner is a contributing author on a new article published in Annals of Family Medicine, “Patients’ Survival Expectations With and Without Their Chosen Treatment for Prostate Cancer.”
Published in the May/June 2016 issue, the study is authored by Jinping Xu, MD, James Janisse, PhD, Julie J. Ruterbusch, MPH, Joel Ager, PhD, Joe Liu, MD, Margaret Holmes-Rovner, PhD, and Kendra L. Schwartz, MD, MSPH.
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