at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s. By the end of the 80s, prognoses had climbed from a matter of hours to a matter of months, mostly due to substances we knew only by letters and numbers.

Now that the emergency is over and patients are maintained for years on drug cocktails, we're back to doing double blind studies. We skipped them in the big teaching hospitals back in the 80s, legal or not, on patients who were facing a quick and certain death. The double blind studies proceeded outside the hospitals with patients who were infected but not yet deathly ill.

There should always be a loophole for the terminal as long as they're advised that the drug might hasten their death or prolong their lives and it was unknown which it would be.

whose medication is technically off label (interferon is approved for Hep C not my illness. That is still in clinical trial stage) and had to fight the insurance company for the right to have this drug. I'm not agaisnt these laws. If you are dying, and there are no other options, why not? Sometimes you can pull off miracles that way. Look at the woman dying of cancer who was saved by the mega dose of the measles vaccine...

I should add, also, that off label and unapproved drugs ARE NOT WOO.

Shit that doesn't have a hope of doing anything like putting crystals on you for 10 minutes is woo.

if standard medicine has no more to offer a person, I see no harm, and the possibility of good, in their trying nonstandard approaches, so long as they are made fully aware of the risks of doing so.

This will open the door to any and every snake-oil salesman like those guys just thrown in jail for "stem cell treatments" that were absolutely bogus.

"Oh but if they are dying, let them try it!"

So then they have the "right" to lose their life savings also to quacks?

Terminally ill and other desperate people often waste their money on snake oil remedies now. They might do so less if they had the option of receiving treatments that have at least some empirical validation, even if not completed.