4 ms·
#3 exists - drug trials occur in hospitals (research hospitals?). My only knowledge is late stage cancer where death is all but a certainty, so they can test ne
by soared 3y ago
#3 exists - drug trials occur in hospitals (research hospitals?). My only knowledge is late stage cancer where death is all but a certainty, so they can test new cancer drugs with doctor/patient/etc/drug company consent and oversight. Your ability to enter a trial is largely out of your hands though - if your case fits the conditions for a test you can ask around or your doctor may offer, but plenty of factors can rule you out.
- bruce511 3y agoTaking "no hope" patients into a clinical trial is something of a bad-science dillema. On one hand you have patients either a certain death diagnosis. They'll take anything, they have nothing to lose. From the drug trial point of view its more complex. Your death and side-effects are recorded. It's not great if half the people in a study die. What if 90% die? Adding lots of one type of patient yo one side of a study, without adding similar to the control group, invalidates the whole study. And people who are already "hopeless" may end up masking the good outcomes for people earlier in treatment. Currently there's no mechanism for random unproven drugs to be disseminated outside of a study, but equally its a rare study that wants to add "certain death" candidates to the roster. If we want "hail mary" options in drug administration then we need that to exist outside of nedical studies. And formalising this would be difficult because one senses that moves in this direction would open the door to massive exploitation and profiteering by both snake-oil salesmen and big pharma.