In her case, as in others, courts ordered insurers to pay the costs. Well, insurance companies threw in the towel and started paying for bone marrow transplants broadly because of some of the verdicts. That's in part because assembling such studies was difficult. In a well-done clinical trial of this type, patients are randomly assigned to receive either the experimental treatment being tested or the standard, effective therapy. But many patients resisted entering trials, since they were convinced that the experimental treatment was their only hope.
Patients nowadays are very intelligent.
They do not want to be randomized to the chemotherapy line, despite my emphasis saying, 'We're not sure if this works at this point in certain situations. They would go elsewhere. Out of the estimated 12,000 women who underwent the treatment, only 1,000 participated in clinical trials. The real tragedy in this story is that if women had enrolled in the bone marrow transplant trials, if their physicians had encouraged them to do so, we would have had the answer years ago, and it would have saved lives. Gradually, though, major trials were assembled and began to accumulate results.