Clinical Trials: Weeding Out the Myths from the Facts
Clinical trials have always been one of the foundations for breakthroughs in the medical world. Whether it’s finding a cure to a disease, solving a medical mystery or just improving the overall landscape of the healthcare system, clinical studies and trials help put the body into theories and prove the efficiency of facts beyond words.
But clinical trials have not been free from speculations, especially with some myths that may cause some people to think twice about participating in them. Here, we talk about some of the most common myths out there and we compare them with real facts:
Myth: Clinical Trials will put you at Risk
Many speculations have been going on about how unsafe it is to participate in clinical studies. But in reality, no clinical trial has been conducted without first spending years on research.
When you participate in these clinical trials, you’re not treated like a guinea pig, which is what you probably hear of. On the contrary, you’ll be treated as a human where your rights are respected in the highest form.
Experts who conduct clinical studies take all the necessary measures to protect their subjects. They go through review boards, preparations, and periodic monitoring before they even let you try anything.
While on the course of your trial, you will be given all the attention you need, whether you’re feeling anything or not. There are risks to everything, but experts always try to mitigate these risks to make sure you only reap the benefits from these trials.
Myth: Clinical Trials are Never Beneficial
There is that prejudice that clinical trials are mainly just experiments that don’t offer any benefits to their subjects. But if you think about it, a clinical trial exists mainly because of the quest for finding a cure or discovering a new form of treatment, which in its essence is really about benefiting not only the subjects of the trial but the bigger population in the long run.
Myth: Clinical Trials are the Last Resort
Let’s say that you are suffering from cancer and you’ve exhausted all your treatment options already. So now that you’re out of ways to treat yourself, you are considering a clinical trial as a last resort before you fully give up. It could be a possibility, but there’s nothing wrong with exploring what you have left.
Many patients go through trials in the hopes that they will finally find the treatment they need, but other patients also participate while going through other treatments because they want to pave the way for breakthroughs that will not only help them but also other people in the future.
The Takeaway
The medical world is a constant quest for answers. With the growing number of diseases and the increasing rate of people suffering from them, experts never give up on finding ways to improve the medical world, if only to give people more chances to enjoy their lives. So if you want to be part of that difference, it’s never bad to be part of a clinical trial.
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