The vast majority of clinical trials fail - the majority of participating patients have to go through a barrage of inconvenient, risky and often painful procedu

The vast majority of clinical trials fail - the majority of participating patients have to go through a barrage of inconvenient, risky and often painful procedures for no benefit whatsoever, or to their active detriment. The fact that seriously ill people seek out trials in the belief that it'll prolong their life is in itself an ethical failure. The reason we do clinical trials is so that we know which treatments actually work, to spare patients the cost and suffering of being subjected to a vast array of speculative treatments based purely on a hunch. Travelling across the country to be a guinea pig is not, for most people, how they would choose to spend their last days on earth. I applaud anyone who chooses to participate in a trial because they want to contribute to advancing the frontiers of clinical knowledge, but I pity anyone who participates in a trial because they've got their hopes up about some shiny new treatment that is overwhelmingly likely to be a total waste of time. In my country, it's fairly common to see fundraisers for terminally ill young people to send them to America "for pioneering (i.e. completely unproven) treatment". My heart sinks every time I see it, because I know that the vast majority of those young people will end up dying just as quickly as they would have done without the trial, but with many of the last days of their life squandered in the pursuit of vanishingly thin odds.