This is a painful story to write.
A close friend of mine, in his 40’s, had a persistent light cough for many months. Finally, when he had an X-ray taken, it showed a large tumor on his lungs. He was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. As a non-smoker and strapping, physically fit man, he was shocked, as you can imagine.
He went to his non-Boston-based medical practice, and he was told the prognosis was 12 to 18 months before he would die. They offered him, though, the chance to enroll in a clinical trial, based on a cocktail of chemotherapy agents.
Meanwhile, he wrote to me and another hospital-based friend in Boston, and our cancer experts in both places pointed out that there is a particular genotype of tumor that is susceptible to an oral chemotherapy drug. This type of tumor is present, in the case of non-smokers, about 17% of the time. Folks here recommended that he have a biopsy to see if he was “lucky.”
When he went back to his local medical practice and relayed this information from two of the world’s greatest oncologists, the local doctor discouraged him from getting the biopsy. He said that recovery from the biopsy operation would delay the start of the clinical trial by a month. The doctor intimated that there were very few slots left in the trial and that my friend might be excluded if he waited.
My friend chose to ignore the local doctor’s recommendation, relying on the advice of the Boston doctors. He came here and had the biopsy. It was a match. He started the chemotherapy regime, and it shrunk the tumor by 90%. This enabled it to be surgically removed, with good pathology results in the surrounding tissues. After surgery, he returned home in good shape and has started a maintenance chemotherapy program.
Upon returning home, too, he discovered that the local clinical trial actually was not at all fully subscribed, that they have been having trouble getting enough subjects.
The conclusions I draw from this are very distasteful. Perhaps I am too close to this because it involved a friend, and perhaps others of you see this differently; but I see a medical practice that intentionally put one its patients at risk to support the professional advancement of one of its doctors, and perhaps the financial advancement of that person or the practice, too.
Am I being unfair in my characterization?
Paul Levy is the former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and blogs at Not Running a Hospital. He is the author of Goal Play!: Leadership Lessons from the Soccer Field and How a Blog Held Off the Most Powerful Union in America.
