I came across this website, which is a subset of the NIH website, when I was looking for materials for another class on the NIH page. It got me thinking about why clinical trials are important and why people choose to participate, taking into account both the risks and the benefits of participating in a trial for a particular drug or treatment method. On a personal level, I think there are several benefits for signing up to be a part of a clinical study, the first being the hope that the treatment or drug will ameliorate the person’s condition or cure him/her. Additionally, study participants are also the first to receive cutting-edge treatments. Also, oftentimes such treatments are free, and participants are reimbursed for travel or other expenses. Sometimes there is even compensation beyond the treatment itself and reimbursement—which, I think, is a great incentive for particularly risky procedures or questionable treatments. (But then, this raises the question—what kinds of people do such incentives attract? If the majority of participants in a particular study came from a lower socioeconomic status, could that affect the outcome of the study?) Then there is also the larger incentive of contributing knowledge production and helping others with the same condition.
There are also risks to consider, depending on the treatment or drug to be tested—such as unforeseen side-effects, inconvenience/disruption of everyday life, hospitalization, the possibility of receiving a placebo (whereupon any medical benefits are forsaken), the need to understand study protocols and one’s own rights, and the possibility of ineffectual treatment, to name a few risks.
The website offers a good deal of useful information to patients who are considering participating in such a trial. What other benefits/risks are there to participating in a clinical trial? In what situations would some of these benefits/risks be larger than in others?
Monday, March 24, 2008
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2 comments:
I know that this isn't exactly pertinent to your post, however, it made me think of something I had read recently on the topic of whether or not participants in psychology experiments are representative samples... http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/01/just-how-representative-are-people-who.html
It made me think of how many psych/HD classes offer incentives (extra credit) for participating in experiments such as these, when often times students rush through them and probably distort the validity of the researchers results.
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/
2008/01/
just-how-representative-
are-people-who.html
i don't think the link went through on my last reply because it's too long, so i split it up a bit. if you copy and past the whole thing, just remove the spaces and it should work.
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