Patients, Too, Turn to the Internet for Fund-Raising - NYTimes.com
A friend sent me this link, yesterday, after I told her that I am about to start a new treatment that costs $1600 a month out-of-pocket. I blogged about this treatment (immunotherapy, Dr. Recchia) in some recent posts.
There's no way I can come up with this amount of additional income, so I am just going to see how much I CAN come up with, and then do the treatment in a "partial" way. So...if I can come up with $800 a month, I'll do the treatment at a 50 percent level instead of 100 percent. No one knows if the results will be correspondingly less...or if maybe doing less will still lead to just as good of results. They don't know because no one is doing any of the big clinical trials for this treatment, here in the U.S., because it would not be a big money-maker for the pharmaceutical companies. There's no way they are going to spend millions of dollars on a study that won't lead to big profits for them down the road.
However, a small study was done in Italy (with 500 women who had stage 4 breast cancer, as I do) and the results of that study were remarkably positive. The 10-year survival rate for these women went from approximately 23 percent to 45 percent. So you can see why I am highly motivated to find a way to do it, myself.
I've kept this idea of "fundraising" for my medical treatments on the back burner for a long time. I don't want to resort to it unless or until I really truly absolutely can't figure out any other way to do it on my own.
I don't know if I'm "there" yet...but I think I am moving closer. It's hard to ask people to just give you money, especially in these difficult economic times. Everyone is nervous about what's going to happen to our fragile economy.
So...we shall see. In the meantime, wish me luck with my "challenge."
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