Advantages & Disadvantages to Clinical Trials

When a new medication or therapy has been developed, it must pass clinical trials before it can legally be sold or administered to the public. These trials involve treating groups of volunteers split into a sample group and a control group. Researchers have to satisfactorily test their treatments on animals before they are permitted to conduct human trials, but even at the last stages of testing, clinical trials have their advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages to Participants

• Participating in a clinical trial is a proactive way to take control of your own health care by gaining access to new treatments when traditional therapies may not be working for you. Patients in a trial are often treated at top hospitals and research facilities by medical experts to whom they may not otherwise have access. The results of a clinical trial can potentially make lasting contributions to the standards of treatment, and many trials also offer some monetary compensation to participants.

Disadvantages to Participants

• In a clinical trial, participants are being treated with experimental therapies that may not be effective, either generally or for an individual patient. Worse, there is a potential for adverse or even life-threatening side effects or reactions to the treatment that the researchers may not have been able to predict. Experimental therapies may also require a greater time commitment from study participants, who may have to travel to the research site, submit to hospital stays and observation, or follow a very strict dosage regimen so that researchers can get an accurate result of the treatment's efficacy.

Advantages to Researchers

• Randomized control tests, in which subjects are chosen at random for either the test group or control group, are considered by the medical community to be the most effective because randomness counteracts biases that may otherwise exist in the study's design. A successful trial can lead to rapid changes in accepted medical practices through the introduction of new treatments or even the abandonment of less effective treatments and technologies in the face of a bad trial result.

Disadvantages to Researchers

• Randomized control trials may not be effective as a guide for health care policy makers. Generalizing the results of a randomized control trial to a larger population is nearly impossible, as is organizing such trials for diagnostic and surgical techniques, as there can be no control group. Some therapies may also require lengthy follow-up periods that can delay the results of a trial.