Controversial Bioethicist Resigns From Celltex 48
ananyo writes "Bioethicist Glenn McGee has resigned his position as president of ethics and strategic initiatives at the stem-cell firm Celltex Therapeutics in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, Slashdot posted a story that suggested Celltex may have administered unproven treatments to several patients. The move comes at the end of a turbulent three months, which has seen McGee blasted by other bioethicists for working at the controversial stem-cell company while also holding the post of editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, the most cited bioethics journal in the world. McGee announced that he had resigned, effective 28 February, on Twitter last night — the move came just two weeks after the 13 February press release by Celltex announcing that he would take the position."
Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:5, Insightful)
There many instances of the doctor writing the individual off as almost dead when they live for years afterwards.
True enough, but it's the best information we have.
Doctors currently can't predict how long you are going to live accurately enough to legitimize allowing them to give experimental treatment to people they think have a month to live.
I would disagree. The key is informed consent. Do you carefully explain all of the relevant information? Do you explain where you could be wrong? Do you give an accurate accounting of potential benefits and potential harms? Can the patient understand all of that?
Informed consent is hard to do, but lacking every potential bit of information is not an absolute barrier.
Re:Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell that to Vietnam war veterans.
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True enough, but it's the best information we have.
Exactly, and in this case the best we have isn't good enough, therefore administering untested treatments remains unethical.
If the doctors themselves are not adequately informed about a patient, how could a patient ever give informed consent?
Re:Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:4)
If it's unproven, your insurance company isn't going to cover it, period. So these types of companies are emotionally extorting people by charging high fees in addition to using you as a guinea pig. If the treatment was given for free, as it usually is in proper medical trials it would be a different matter.
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I agree with your sentiments, but in my understanding it doesn't always work that way.
First, insurance companies do cover unproven treatments under some circumstances. Legitimately, there are some diseases that have no proven treatments, so doctors have to do the best they can, with treatments they think will work. Some cancer is so rare that no one has ever done a controlled trial before, so they say, "It looks like a colon cancer, so let's treat it as a colon cancer."
What's proven? How much evidence do yo
Re:Well... how else are you gona prove them? (Score:5, Informative)
They argue that in holding both posts, McGee has a conflict of interest between his responsibilities to the journal [of Bioethics] and his new employer’s desire to promote the clinical application of stem-cell treatments that are not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
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and it is the job of bioethics to make sure they don't go into an ethical violation with the treatments.
No, that's not the role of bioethics. Ethics in general is an attempt to determine what we should do and shouldn't do.
The conflict of interest comes from the possibility that McGee could review papers that are critical of his other employer or competitors of his employer. Sounds like a rather remarkable lapse of judgment on McGee's part.
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Life saving, and life threatening decisions always need impeccable documentation of the circumstances. What if the patient doesn't believe you and wants a second decision? Obviously a second opinion
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Here is a blanket statement. I would think that all people when they are the ones who are sick would want the choice to be theirs not the governments.
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Personal Choice and Not Government Mandates ... wow what a concept. Welcome To Libertarian core principle.
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Been here quite a while. But thanks for the welcome anyway.
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Republican Party is not what you claim it to be. You guys are about to elect Obama Lite for President (Romney). If the party was where you claimed, Ron Paul would be doing so much better.
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There's no evidence for that and some evidence to the contrary. Jessie Gruman, who interviewed 200 patients about the way they make medical decisions, said that most patients can't and don't want to make their own decisions about health care. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer-driven_health_care [wikipedia.org]
Those patients want their doctors to make the decisions. Most patients also want government regulations to protect them against bad decisions. They are surprised to find out when they get a bad result from a "die
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Way to go.
Just to help you out I would like to point out a small flaw in your attempt at equivalency.
Wanting to be able to trust in your doctors decision about your medical care and neither you nor your doctor being able to make a decision about care because of what congress wants are not the same.
If on the other hand you feel that the US government is better able to make decisions about your health care than you or your doctor I encourage you to turn your care over to them.
But just because you feel that yo
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If I were a doctor, I couldn't imagine making a blanket statement that everyone would want the same thing.
This was discussed in the latest New England Journal of Medicine.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1109283 [nejm.org]
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There's a certain element of quality of life to be taken into consideration, too. My father died of brain cancer but participated in a study to see if an unusually higher use of chemo might improve the odds of survival. It's hard to say if the cancer or the drugs were what caused more suffering. Being really, really sick can sometimes be worse than death I would have to believe, especially if the odds for recovery are slim. So while the "why not give it a shot?" attitude has a certain bit of logic to it
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Informed consent is not compatible with a profit incentive unless you have a proven treatment. I don't know if Celltex is like other stem cell companies, but most of them will
With clinical trials (Score:5, Informative)
You prove that this works through clinical trials. But Celltex Therapeutics isn't conducting any such trials. They have made vague comments about starting some trials sometime in the future, but that's it. They don't have any control subjects. They don't have any animal test results on which they are basing their human predictions on. They haven't even identified what ailments they are going to be testing their treatment for!
In the meanwhile they are happy to inject anyone willing to pay the $7k+ per injection, for whatever ailment they complain about, regardless of whether there is any reason to think the treatment would help, or whether the patient would otherwise suffer and die.
Re:With clinical trials (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep exactly. There are two problems here.
1. Celltex hasn't done any clinical trials of any sort. To prove a treatment works you need a double-blind trial at least - administer placebo to one group, and the cells to another and make sure the physician in charge doesn't know which one is being given to which patient. Then when you 'unblind' the trial and reveal which patient got what - that's when (if it's worked) you start charging. In the trial phase, a company should be providing the treatment free with placebo and working with the FDA. They shouldn't be charging for voodoo treatments/homeopathy.
2. Big conflict of interest for McGee from the start - it's difficult to claim you can independently assess papers on bioethics, when many of the papers are likely to be about stem cells and trials but you're being paid by a firm that is growing stem cells.
As the (accidentally unlinked when I submitted) Nature story [nature.com] says, McGee claimed he hoped by being inside the company, he could push them to do trials properly. When it became clear they were already treating patients and probably weren't too interested in testing the treatments, he quit. At least, that's one interpretation....
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1. Celltex hasn't done any clinical trials of any sort. To prove a treatment works you need a double-blind trial at least - administer placebo to one group, and the cells to another and make sure the physician in charge doesn't know which one is being given to which patient. Then when you 'unblind' the trial and reveal which patient got what - that's when (if it's worked) you start charging. In the trial phase, a company should be providing the treatment free with placebo and working with the FDA. They shouldn't be charging for voodoo treatments/homeopathy.
That's the way it should work but unfortunately it doesn't. In cancer, for example, many studies of new drug treatments or combinations for a particular cancer are done by doctors as part of their regular practice, who are getting paid by the drug company for the study and also getting paid by the patients for their treatment. Sometimes they get the drug free, but if it's a drug that's already approved for another indication, they charge the patient for that too.
I always thought it was unethical. Then I fou
Ouch... (Score:3)
So he took the position there just in time to find out the place is shady, take a bunch of heat, and resign?
That sucks.
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So he took the position there just in time to find out the place is shady, take a bunch of heat, and resign?
That sucks.
They don't actually strike me as shady. They offer untested but hopeful treatments to terminal patients with no alternatives at a time when the FDA isn't even equipped to test the safety of stem cells.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "FDA isn't equipped to test the safety of stem cells" either. Stem cells can be injected into mice. If they grow tumors, that ain't a safe test. Fun fact: injecting stem cells into mice CAN cause teratomas. It evidently doesn't happen every time, and typically
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Parent's post wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't also been plagiarized. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jmuhZY2mgs [youtube.com]
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And if man were meant to fly nature would have given him wings.
In other words....Fuck off.
If God meant me to fly (Score:2)
He would have given me tickets.
Ethicist (Score:2)
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And some do not. I state that right and wrong is a fiction create by the projection of ours desires, needs, pains and anxiety unto others. It has no basis in Nature and that is why you can find example of successful (enough that we know about them ) civilizations that had at least one core value completely opposite to one our own (the western judeochristian one) for every core values (do not kill, do not steal, do not rape...).
The closer you can currently get to a non-Platonic definition of right and wrong
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We don't base our values on a state of nature, though. We base them on principles that we develop through consensus over time. That's how we manage to refrain from fighting and fucking for long enough to develop and maintain a technological civilization.
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It's 'religious' in that it relies on system of beliefs rather than facts and experiment, but it it's important anyway. Not everything can be reduced to logic.
Codifying something, be it religious, scientific, engineering or what have you has validity. It's how you start a framework for discussion.
My karma ran over your dogma, as it were.
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Nah, it sounds just like an esthetician, only more facials....
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/esthetician [reference.com]
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Bullshit indeed.
There was an article by Carl Elliot (I think it was in the Atlantic but I can't find it right now) in which he explained that he was a philosophy professor, he had written about medical ethics, and he got calls from drug companies wanting him to work on their ethics panels. They would pay him a lot of money, and all he had to do was review their clinical trials and approve them.
Indeed, the term "ethicist" has become a term of the art in the pharmaceutical industry. It sounds (to the naive) l
Way to go. (Score:4, Interesting)
blasted by other bioethicists for working at the controversial stem-cell company
Fail. This is exactly the kind of company that we want a bioethicist working for.
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jumping to conclusions? (Score:1)
didnt read the article but is it possible he got a better offer?