My son is 12 years old. No matter how many Legos we get him, he will only build robotic mechs. He draws haunting pictures in pen and ink but refuses to take an art class. He was devastated to learn that Chuck E Cheese is phasing out its animatronics. His guidance counselor says he’s so kind, he’s really hard to say no to. He sneezes when he steps out into the sunlight. And he also has a very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.

Further, if Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival.

That’s because my son is part of a clinical trial for a novel cancer treatment. A shade under two years ago, we got word that he had mass growing around three of his ribs. The prognosis was scary, but early efforts to treat the disease were promising, and he was declared disease-free last summer. A couple of months ago, though, the cancer roared back. We didn’t have lots of good options, but the best of them was a clinical trial featuring a novel combination of chemo and immunotherapy. We signed up almost immediately. Early results have been mixed, but we press on, one teeth-grinding cycle at a time.

Then out of the blue this summer, word broke that the prediction market Kalshi would launch a pilot program that allows users to bet on pending FDA decisions and the results of clinical trials. The first raft of offerings includes a contract on whether an anti-cancer drug will be approved and another on whether a trial for an Alzheimer’s drug will meet its goals.

In other words, cancer and Alzheimer’s patients are praying that these treatments will succeed. But Kalshi is about to permit outside speculators to place ghastly bets that they won’t. Why?

Representatives from the company say that this isn’t about betting on the success or failure of potentially life-saving treatments. It’s about “surfacing information”, the company’s CEO said in a statement, via what the company describes as a “continuously updated, public probability that reflects the weight of the evidence, rather than the preferred message of the trial sponsor”.

The CEO, Tarek Mansour, said: “Drug development is one of the most important and most information-constrained industries on earth […] The data that determines which drugs advance and which don’t is largely locked away from the people who need it most.”

To some extent, I agree. When my son’s cancer returned, our doctors informed us of a number of different trials for which he was eligible. But picking among them was and continues to be a terrifying experiment for which we feel ill-prepared.

That being said, the idea that our family would turn to a prediction market to help us make these decisions – rather than to our extremely qualified team of oncologists – is preposterous, even if we set aside the possibility that such markets are much less accurate than their CEOs would lead us to believe. (All this is to say nothing of experts’ real fears that betting on trials and approvals will hinder or harm potentially life-saving research.)

And yet for me, whether or not Kalshi is actually good at “surfacing” such data is beside the point. Having our child participate in a clinical trial has been at times a staggering burden. The treatment has some very challenging present side effects – and others that may show up years in the future. And while we are hopeful that our trial succeeds, we are painfully aware that the heavy majority do not.

To add to these things, the possibility that somebody out there might be wagering against my son, hoping that the treatment fails so they can make money, is enraging. How is this not just another type of “death market” – like markets for war or assassination – that even Kalshi says it won’t abide?

It must be said that Kalshi is not currently allowing bets on treatments for children. But Mansour has been very insistent in imagining a world in which “any difference in opinion” is a wagerable event. Further, the Trump administration is going to remarkable lengths to keep the sector from being regulated. So it feels possible that my son’s trial will be one of those “differences in opinion” all too soon. Maybe that won’t happen. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

• Joshua Pederson is professor of humanities at Boston University and the author of Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature