I hope that you are feeling a bit better today, unregistered guest. While I think that life was better before breast cancer, certainly there are still some good things and helps me to focus on what I still have rather than what I have lost.
The question of why bad things happen to good people is an old one and in the early days of breast cancer I did feel a bit like Job (who lost everything but his life). Instead of "why me?," I think "why not me?" Time and chance happen, unfortunately. But, at least for her2 positive breast cancer, the clinical proof is that the drugs have made a big difference to the survival of her2 patients and I am thankful for that.
The governments do need to get things together and work things out. Right now there are real problems in comparing US and European clinical trials on breast cancer simply because no study has been done comparing the efficacy of FEC (the European standard anthracycline) with AC (the US standard), so studies based on those combinations don't readily translate, although this problem might disappear if they are replaced by a new anthracycline. From a her2 perspective, there have been two drugs trials now, one in Finnland and one in Miami, with fairly strong results indicating that perhaps giving herceptin only during chemo is adequate, but attempts to get the larger trial, FinHer, tested more widely in Europe seem to be foundering because the governments don't want to shell out for this type of research, even though these small trials had fewer heart problems and were highly effective (83% disease free survival at 3 years for stage III patients in the Miami trial of herceptin+cisplatin+taxotere->AC with low cardiotoxicity (1 woman with congestive heart failure out of arounf 40). The costs of the full-year of herceptin (not just the drug, but also the administration) mean that it is simply too expensive for many countries and you would think the governments would be chomping at the bit to find a more efficient use, but apparently not. There is some good material on this in an article 'Beyond the Herceptin Hype,' which is, unlike many similarly titled items on the internet, an intelligent discussion of the problem of expensive drugs.
http://www.cancerworld.org/CancerWor...e.aspx?id=1083