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New medicines 'pushing up NHS cancer costs'
September 28, 2011
Cancer experts have expressed concern at the cost of new therapies designed to extend the lives of terminally ill patients.
The NHS is spending an increasing amount on cancer care as a result of new medicines and surgical procedures, experts have warned.
Writing in the Lancet Oncology journal, a group of medics suggest that some terminally ill patients may be better off not receiving these new therapies, which are designed to extend life.
The experts say that such therapies can offer "false hope" in the last weeks of a patient's life and that the medical profession has developed a tendency to "overtreat and overpromise".
"If we could accurately predict when further disease-directed therapy would be futile, we clearly would want to spare the patient the toxicity and false hope associated with such treatment, as well as the expense," said the experts, who were led by King's College London's Professor Richard Sullivan.
The suggestion could mean that patients would be more reliant on private medical insurance to obtain life-extending cancer drugs in future.
But Duleep Allirajah, policy manager at Macmillan Cancer Support, described some of the team's comments as "extremely unsympathetic".
He added that labelling palliative care treatment as futile "undermines each patient's personal experience and desire to extend their lives".
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