Clinical trials and the common good
A hard call when you are not living in a dying man’s shoes, but this insight into the purpose of clinical trials is well, clinical.
I have been engaged in a Twitter chat about stem cells and clinical trials. The gist of the chat was questioning whether I thought stem cells worked and that all apparent treatments were bogus. Within this was the comment that it is a shame clinical trials take so long in the West as loads of people would like to participate in them.
I thought this article in Science Progress (Clinical trials and the common good) gave a reasonable overview – even though it is opinion and US-based. I would tend to agree with the commentary, but then I am not living in the shoes of a dying patient.
For the record
I do think stem cell treatments work – those that been proven to do so anyway. I was simply trying to raise awareness about the clinics offering bogus or, at best, unproven treatments. On the topic of clinical trials I reiterated that the treatments offered by the Dodgy Brother clinics were not clinical trials. They are as far as one can tell simply an unproven treatment: you rock up, hand over cash, and generally speaking get an injection of stem cells and go home. You are, in effect, worse than a lab rat as you are not part of any controlled experiment.