Note: 81 of 85 patients died after undergoing bone marrow transplant.
Four survivors out of 85 is not even good enough to be classed as a placebo
effect. Such "success" is more likely to good luck than anything else. This
underscores the fact that this is a highly experimental treatment. With such
a dismal success record the medical establishment still allows this to go on.
Contrast this with chelation therapy - which having established a 85 percent
efficacy and virtually 99.99 percent safety record in the treatment of heart
disease - the same medical establishment would shut it down. CW
Cancer Center Faces Patient Lawsuit
Fri Feb 6,12:12 PM ET
SEATTLE - A lawyer accused doctors at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center � including a Nobel Prize winner � of not telling five patients about all the risks of an experimental bone-marrow transplant.
In opening statements in a lawsuit, the lawyer for the center responded Thursday that the doctors were doing the best they could with the state of knowledge at the time to try to save the leukemia patients.
The families of the five, who died in the early 1980s, are seeking unspecified damages from the center and the doctors. One of the physicians is E. Donnall Thomas, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on bone-marrow transplants.
Plaintiff attorney David Breskin, who alleges negligence and fraud, told the King County Superior Court jury the patients should have received more information about the experimental treatment known as T-cell depletion.
"Had they provided all the information, no reasonably prudent person would ever have consented to participate," Breskin said.
Scientists altered the donated marrow by removing T-cells in an attempt to prevent a sometimes-fatal complication of transplants known as graft vs. host disease. The disease occurs when the donated marrow attacks a patient's organs.
The procedure was performed on the patients from 1981 to 1993. Of 85 patients participating, 81 died. Breskin said more would have lived under standard treatments at the time.
Joe Fisher, widower of cancer patient Ruth Fisher, said outside court that his family believes they were not given enough information about the experimental process.
"This all happened a long time ago, but the collective recollection of our family and the notes we took indicate we didn't have the full story," he said.
Attorneys for the center, which draws patients from around the world for bone marrow transplants, said scientists did the best they could with the available knowledge.
"The culprit in the deaths of these five unfortunate people is leukemia ... not these fine physicians who were trying to prolong their lives," defense attorney George Mernick said.
However, Judge Douglas McBroom has already ruled that four of the patients, including Fisher, died from graft failure or graft rejection caused by T-cell depletion. The cause of death of the fifth patient is disputed.
Breskin said the patients signed a stack of confusing and contradictory consent forms and were not told key facts, such as that another, less risky experimental treatment was also available.
He also claimed the three doctors had a conflict of interest because they all had stock in Genetic Systems, a biotechnology company that was developing antibodies used in the T-cell process.
Mernick denied that Genetic Systems was doing work related to the T-cell depletion process and said patients knew the center's work was experimental and that they were told what happened to others who had undergone the same procedure.
The trial is expected to last eight weeks.
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