The Clinical Trials Guru

A word about paid studies. Let’s face it, many people that I’ve run across, not only at my own site, but also at industry conventions and other such events, choose to do studies for the payments. This especially become the case in phase 1, healthy volunteer studies. We will touch much more on this topic in future posts, but I would just like to say that while there is nothing necessarily wrong with doing studies primarily for the payment, many people, especially those in phase 2-4 studies, don’t consider payment the primary reason for doing studies. For many people that I’ve come across, traditional therapies that are already available on the market do not work as well as previously anticipated, and these people seek newer treatments not yet available via clinical trials. In cases such as these, payment becomes a mere afterthought, and the treatment of the disorder or disease become the primary motivator. Furthermore, many patients feel as though they actually receive better medical attention when they participate in studies. This may be true in many cases, as some outpatient study visits may take anywhere from 1-4 hours, and all bases are pretty much covered in terms of a clinical perspective (vital signs, labwork, ECG’s, MRI’s, CT Scans, quality of life surveys, etc). Many of these procedures, while often important, will never get recommended in a non-study setting due to ever increasing pressure from insurance companies to keep costs down, however in a study, these procedures would never be overlooked. This may be a sign of the times, and evidence of how broken our medical system actually is (that is subject matter for another blog altogether). Much more on this later. Feel free to share your thoughts.