Treatments

[asterroc]

I'm working on writing a letter to my health insurance company, appealing their decision to not cover the drug Remicade for my hidradenitis suppurativa (HS). It's going to be an uphill battle, as the FDA has approved Remicade for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and a couple other inflammatory/auto-immune diseases, but HS isn't one of them. I would have 4-5 visits to a clinic where I'd have a 2-hour infusion of the drug, each visit separated by a month or so. Without any insurance coverage it'd be some ten thousand bucks a pop, so it's not an option. There have been less than 20 case studies of Remicade treating HS, but all have seen marked improvement in not only the flare-ups, but also in the quiescent state. My appeal letter is supposed to be a bit of the personal side, and I was going to write a few paragraphs describing all the different drugs I've tried and how they didn't work, or why drugs I haven't tried aren't any good for me, but I got all fancy and decided to make a table instead.





Why don't I try pumping some more ineffective and harmful drugs into my system while I'm at it? Give me more antibiotics, and accutane too so I can have dry skin for the rest of my life and be required a monthly pregnancy test because if the required two forms of birth control fail there's a 75% chance any pregnancy would end in a miscarriage or still birth, and those're the lucky ones that aren't born severely deformed and unlikley to survive past infancy.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Effective!
*hugs*

[blue102.livejournal.com]

The table is a great idea... it conveys a lot of information. And it documents well the widely varying things you've tried, with little success! Best of luck... I'd kick those insurance bastards in the cojones for you if I thought it'd do any good...

hugs,
j

the meaning of N/A

[poludamas.livejournal.com]

I usually interpret N/A to mean not applicable, which seems to be correct in the case of amoxicillin, which is taken at the onset of flareups and therefore the question of whether it prevents them is not applicable. However, in some other cases, N/A is apparently being used in a different sense, such as with accutane. Obviously if the ability of accutane to do any of the three things in the rightmost columns fell into the not applicable category, it wouldn't even be listed here. So, it must be that the other meaning of N/A--not available, since the data have not been gathered--is now in play. If I were critiquing this as part of a scientific paper, I would say that these two cases should be disambiguated. You could, for example, replace the N/A's for accutane and sulfacetamide with -- or ? or "unknown". I would also say "unlikely" would be OK since (for the sulfa drug) antibacterials seem to have done very little for you in general and (for accutane) this is not nodular acne.