Should Women With Breast Cancer Be Guinea Pigs?

If you're a reader of my blog, you know I'm all for women's rights, whether it's the right to go braless or even topless. This time I'm standing up for an even more serious subject: a woman's right to be a guinea pig.

I mean "guinea pig" in the best possible sense, as in being allowed to participate in clinical trials, studies that test the safety or efficacy of new drugs and therapies.

It was just 15 years ago that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began requiring that women be included in clinical trials. Before that, groundbreaking drugs and treatments had typically been tested only on men, in spite of the fact that gender-based biological differences affect not just how women get sick and get better, but also how they respond to particular treatments.

That NIH requirement was a giant step forward, particularly for women with breast cancer, says Laura Esserman, MD, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

"Almost everything we've learned about women and breast cancer has come from clinical trials," says Dr. Esserman. "It's because of clinical trials that we know that modified mastectomy is as good as radical mastectomy and that older women may not need radiation."

Dr. Esserman believes that such trials lead not just to quicker approval of new lifesaving treatment options but ultimately improve the standard of care for all patients.