Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

Understanding clinical trial for cancer disease

You should favor the use of Clinical trials. Nearly all the progress made in treating various kinds of cancer in the last forty years involved their use, according to the National Cancer Institute. The NCI and corporate developers heavily subsidize each one. Cost to the patient is rarely an issue, though cost to the health-insurance provider may be.

About 10 percent of cancer patients participate in one or more clinical trials. The most common reason the other 90 percent don’t is that, for their illness, there is no reason to consider using an experimental drug or procedure.

The illness has an effective, understood means of treatment. The case proceeds as the oncologist intended, meeting everyone’s expectations. Some patients decide not to participate in a clinical trial proposed to them. One of the common reasons is that travel makes it inconvenient.

Another is the completely unfounded fear that you might end up in the group that gets the sugar pill instead of the real deal. Not only is travel inconvenient and diffi cult for ill patients to endure, but also it may be expensive. But the fear of finding out later that you didn’t get the good stuff is unfounded. The managers of any clinical trial that includes a placebotaking control group are duty bound to make certain that everyone in the test knows it.

Clinical trials are run by any of several sets of ground rules, none of which are kept secret from the patients. In one of the most common types of clinical trial, everyone gets the clinical trial medication. In another common format, patients receive either the investigational therapy or what medical science considers the best of the established therapies. In those cases, the best choice between the therapy being tested and the established route is hard to guess, going in. Sometimes the investigational therapy turns out to be best.

Sometimes not. Sometimes parts of each test group enjoy the greater benefits. Sometimes everybody improves about the same. Some people worry that some new drug might be harmful. Except in phase I trials, which are rarely open to the public, your chances of being harmed are low. Federal data indicate that only one in ten thousand patients in clinical trials has died of the effects of the drug being studied. “We’re not doing enough to explain how medical research works, and the benefi ts and rewards of participation,” says Mark Eisenach, chief executive of Acurian, a clinical trials company in Philadelphia.



This post first appeared on One Blog, One Health, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

Understanding clinical trial for cancer disease

×

Subscribe to One Blog, One Health

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×