True, but when you're talking medicines, you may not have a choice in the matter. e.g. You come into the emergency room unconscious, what medicines should the doctors be allowed to use?
Basically, if someone is going to make a decision affecting my body while I'm unconscious, I'd rather have someone I picked for that job to do it (like, I don't know, my doctor or my wife or my dad or my friend or even my insurance company) than some bureaucrat in FDA.
But that's not quite the issue in question, eh? My understanding is, you can't get the unapproved anti-venom even if you are conscious and you are about to die without it anyway, by doctors opinion.
I realize that you still can't get it when you are conscious. I'm just saying that 'personal choice' isn't the only weighing factor here. If you come into the emergency room and you are unconscious, who says that you are with someone (wife,friend,etc) or that there is enough time to try and get in touch with your doctor?
I personally think that the FDA approval process is bogus too. I'm just trying to expand the discussion a bit.
I was just trying not to drift too much into complicated parts of the problem, since the society is obviously unable to fix even the most obvious and simple parts of it.
Yeah, maybe there should be some rules about corner cases like that (what to do with you if you are unconscious and there is nobody to ask about what you'd want to be done to you). And maybe one way to get those rules written and enforced is to have people on government payroll for that. Or maybe we should just leave it to the ER folks. But, frankly, I think it would be nice to fix the obvious big wrongs first, and worry about all this stuff later.
