HUMAN GUINEA PIGS
Claire Foster ©
2006
For medicine to
develop and improve, doctors and other healthcare professionals have to conduct
research. Otherwise all medicine would
be guesswork and no one would be certain whether treatments were definitely
worth giving. Good medicine is evidence-based medicine.
But this means that
people have to be willing to be research subjects – guinea pigs. In the UK, it is legally required that
treatments are tested on animals before they are tested on humans (see Animal Research).
Once the animal
research has been done, new medicines are tested in ‘healthy volunteers’ –
healthy people who are paid to spend some time in a clinic and be observed
taking the new medicine. They are being
watched to see how the human body digests the medicine, and what effects it
might have. These are called ‘safety
and toxicity (poison)’ trials.
Once it has been
established that the medicines are safe to take, they have to be tested to see
if they really treat a disease. It’s
important to do this research properly, because sometimes a medicine can seem to
work when in fact it doesn’t. It’s also
important to keep watching for side effects.
A drug may work well in treating a disease but be so poisonous that it
causes more problems than it solves.
Goal-based question: What is the research aiming to achieve? Has it been properly designed so the question will be answered by
the research?
Duty-based question: Will the human research subjects be harmed in any way by taking
part in the research? If they are ill,
would they be better off not being in the trial and being given tried and
tested medicines?
Right-based question: Has the consent of the research subjects been sought and
obtained? Did they understand what they
were being asked to do?