Filipinos in Crisis

The newspapers here are now quite busy doing stories on the state of our medical system. Doctors have been leaving the country to be as nurses, literally greener pastures.

Estimates are blurry as to how many doctors will be left from this brain drain but the big fact that remains, is that the ordinary Filipino is suffering from lack of doctors and nurses especially in the provinces.

Private and public hospitals are closing down or downscaling from lack of medical personnel. So who is to blame, government blames the doctors and doctors blames the politicians running the government. But up til now, no concrete steps have been made to slow down this trend. Only grandstanding.

I wonder if there will be enough people left after they have finished their grandstanding dramas. Poor little Juan De la Cruz, no food, no job and now... no right to be sick.

 

Dichloroacetate: a cheap but effective cancer drug?

This drug, Dichloroacetate (DCA) has been in the news for the past few weeks now, ever since its paper was published in the Cancer Cell journals. It showed that it can actually kill off the cancer cells by programmed cell death or apoptosis, without even harming the normal cells. A caveat though, its only been tested on mice with tumors.

However, DCA has been used for a long time now, treating patients with lactic acidosis. What is great and promising, is that this drug is cheap, and only the use of DCA AS A CHEMO DRUG has been patented by the primary investigator. The subtance itself is not.

In fact, in the Official website of the University of Alberta, they have already gotten funds for further research on humans, I presume. And of the countries that was mentioned to have given funds is my own country, the Philippines.

Wow!!! I wonder who those person/s are? I'm sure they are not doctors. :)

Genes and then some

I have seen a lot of my patients who have done chemotherapy, radiotherapy or both. But almost all of them somehow will ultimately fail or failed to finish the course because of poor tolerance to the side effects or tumor doesn't respond or even becomes bigger.

Recently, more and more research have come out about the importance of doing genetic profiling of the tumor to get an overall picture of the prognosis as well as which chemotherapeutic agents willl be effective.

I wish that we here in the Philippines, will adopt that and spare patients from trial and error. Though I know that this will be unlikely in the near future since, all medical expenses will be paid by the patients.

Sad to say, our medical insurance in the Philippines, deliberately or not, excluded cancer for coverage and left people to spend a preposterous amount on chemotherapy. And adding insult would be that chemotherapy drug or drugs will eventually go to waste since the patients will not finish a course. Leaving the patient in pain, frustration and disgust to their fate.