With all the news lately about transportation and logistics strikes, we can read about supply chain risk associated with drugs, in our case drugs for a prostate cancer therapy regime.
It is known that major healthcare purchasing organizations and hospital consortia have committees on this topic. As do governments. But it's not something that we as patients think about a lot.
One of my drugs probably comes from India and I don't know where my injectable is coming from. I have no idea as to whether my hospital pharmacy has stocks or not. Or if it's all just just-in-time. And what the shelf life of some of these things are.
There are so many things to think about in terms of managing one's cancer regime, finances and work, relations with spouse and family, not to mention exercise and one's own stability. And now this too ...
We have built a society that is very fragile, to my mind anyway. Astonishingly amazing drugs. But based on business-as-usual in terms of supply. And now that US East Coast ports are all closed, hospital and pharmacy supply chain managers are no doubt freaking out.
And no one's saying very much either. Everything's fine - until it's time for renewal and "oh, sorry". You've now joined a BAT experiment. Let's see what happens if you miss a month.
We aren't there yet. But I thought I'd just bring it up. It's a good idea to end a note like this with something positive that one could do. I'm not sure what that would be.