Remember Avandia? At one point this was in the race for SCC treatment/chemoprotection. This was not a new drug and many people have taken it you would have expected that is should have been safe! This is a big problem with a lot of chemoprotectants.
Pretty much any drug has side effects, ultimately this depends on the risk vs beenefit. For that you either want old drugs that have been around for a long time and/or large and long term studies. (The effects if they exist at all unlikely to be huge).
Unless one NEEDS drugs for a good reason, stay away from them, it still is not candy. In that respect I find the drug commercials unbelievable.
The better a drug/treatment is established with documented trials the more you can believe it. This does not necessarily mean a US trial (in my view ... the funding of the FDA being one reason). But it is fair to say that even if stuff was not developed here, it will get here simply because here is a huge market that no sane pharmceutical industry will ignore. There are exception to this for political/religious reasons (stem cells amongst others) or there are simply too few cases. The other problem is that unless a drug is approved for a specific use the insurance will not pay for it, example being Celebrex as an adjuvant for SCC (radiosensitizer/chemoprotectant). This is currently being studied (Phase I believe). You can argue that this is too soon to be used.
However, I would be really very apprehensive to leave a developed country to get a poorly documented, not regulated treatment for which the claims do not have be related to fact and which you have to pay yourself. BTW I am not xenophobic.
If the treatment fails and the patient dies.... would this be made public here, or would this just end up on a website? On the other hand remember the gene therapy death at UPenn in 1999?



Markus