Why you should participate in clinical trials?
Clinical trials are part of clinical research and at the heart of all medical advances. Clinical trials look at new ways to prevent, detect, or treat disease.
Treatments might be new drugs or new combinations of drugs, new surgical procedures or devices, or new ways to use existing treatments. The goal of clinical trials is to determine if a new test or treatment works and is safe. Clinical trials also look at other aspects of care, such as improving the quality of life for people with chronic illnesses.
Without clinical trials, there would be no new medications.
Before a drug is made available to the general public, it must go through several phases of clinical research and regulatory approvals that show that it is safe and effective in treating a specific disease within the patient population that participated in the clinical trial. Most available medications are the result of past clinical research driven by patients’ unmet needs and lack of adequate treatment options. Without clinical trials and volunteer study participants, there would be no new medications.
The top reasons you should participate as patient in a clinical trial are listed as below:
- Taking a more active role in your own health care
- Gaining access to new treatments not available to the public
- Getting expert medical care at leading health care facilities
- Helping others by contributing to medical research
- Receiving a treatment that works for you
- Contributing to the advancement of medical knowledge
- Having another option when standard therapy has failed
- Receiving the newest treatment, additional care and attention from the healthcare providers and researchers