Hi
I asked the intestinal doctor about this medicine tonight, and he said that this medicine is only in the hospital and under the supervision of a doctor, and special care must be taken before and after it, and in general it is a very heavy and dangerous medicine.
All that this doctor told you is true.
In order to have it prescribed, you have to have one of the exact indications it can be prescribed for ( in the case of the original poster, ulcerative colitis ), AND, you have to have tried all the usual first-line treatments ( in this case, 5-aminosalicylates, azathioprine, mercaptopurines,...) and the results were not good enough. Biologics are a last resort because they have the potential for very severe side effects, they are very expensive, both for the cost of the medication itself, and the management of it ( they are IV drugs, so hospital setting, nurses, and blood tests, before and after, close monitoring if you have infection signs, even a common cold, and so on....).
There is no chance at all that any doctor accepts to prescribe this for a rare syndrome of unknown origin like POIS. It could be a career-ending prescription for this doctor. So, it is not surprising at all that BuckarooBanzai cannot have it prescribed for him.
One day, when some tests will be available to evaluate the different types of POIS, and that some POIS cases would be clearly identified as of auto-immune origin, and that some specific markers will be known that could predict a positive response to immune suppressive therapy, then, maybe, there will be a POIS study made that will try some immune system suppressors for those who have the specific markers for it. But I guess that the more usual immune suppressors treatments would be tried first, I think, like methotrexate, or azathioprine, or else. It would be very surprising ( and controversial) that a researcher would start a trial with a "last resort" biological drug without having tried anything else before it.
I am glad for jeppi that he has unexpected relief for his POIS while treating his ulcerative colitis. This would be an interesting piece of information for future POIS study, but will not lead to any short-term progress because medical research proceeds with extreme caution.
