It’s been a week of medical discovery and debate, writes blogger Emma Suddaby. The high for me was news of a possible future cure for rheumatoid arthritis – the low was listening to the man from NICE shifting blame for denying access to expensive drug treatments on to the pharmaceutical companies, who charge unnecessarily high fees for their products.

Obviously this is close to my heart. I’m currently on one of the treatments that’s causing a furore over cost, from a family of new RA drugs called anti-TNF therapy.

I inject myself with it once a fortnight and though it won’t cure me and has some interesting side-effects, it holds my condition off enough for me to function in the world, have some quality of life, make plans and have aspirations.

Before anti-TNFs came along, I barely had the energy or will left to lift my head.

Thank God I was born in 1973 and not 1873. To be born with a condition like RA back then was to be doomed to spend the whole of one’s tortured life either in The Workhouse or in bed, depending on finances.

We’re very lucky indeed to be living in an age of medical mastery, with ground-breaking treatments emerging all the time.

But how terrible that so many are denied these life-changing, even life-saving treatments on grounds of cost. How can we quantify quality of life?

My treatment is constantly under threat of “review”. There are several different types of anti-TNF and currently an RA patient is prescribed one which usually works well for some time. Eventually, though, they’re likely to become resistant and so doctors will try a different anti-TNF, which may work better for a while, and so on.

But this looks set to change as the high cost of anti-TNF therapy means NICE are about to introduce a new one-shot system of prescribing. It goes like this: You get one go at one anti-TNF, and when it stops working . . . tough.

According to this system, I’ve been living on borrowed time for the last three years as that’s how long I’ve been taking my second anti-TNF, after the first one stopped working so well. Scary.

The kidney drugs assessed recently by NICE were turned down because they gave kidney patients only a few more months to live, rather than curing them.

How can we deny anyone a few more priceless months with their family whilst offering breast enhancement surgery and Viagra treatment on the NHS? And how can those at pharmaceutical company headquarters sleep at night, knowing drugs they’re making for £2,000 somehow end up costing the NHS £24,000?

There is, undoubtedly, more than one guilty party in the scandal of the NHS treatment lottery who should accept blame for preventing these amazing leaps in medical science reaching those they were created for, and who so desperately need them.

It’s all very well living in an era of medical mastery, with ground-breaking treatments emerging all the time, but not much good if you can’t actually access any of them.

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EMMA’S WORD OF THE WEEK:

After starting my campaign last week to encourage people to add new words to their vocabulary, this week the word is

Pertinacious.

Pertinacious is another brilliant word for determination or tenacity. As in: “You’re going to have to get pertinacious about this one.” Or: “You don’t half have to show some pertinacity to get on these new kidney drugs!”

Enjoy!

• Inspirational Emma Suddaby shares her ” highs, lows – and various murky places inbetween” – with her blog. Emma, a finalist in the 2007 Shropshire Star Woman of the Year competition, was diagnosed with aggressive, destructive rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 22. She later won a dream flying scholarship with the charity Flying Scholarships for the Disabled and now holds a National Private Pilot’s Licence.