What you need to know about clinical trials, before you start considering one.
Who runs clinical trials?
Clinical trials are run by researchers, also called investigators, who could be trained as scientists, medics, nurses, complementary or alternative medicine practitioners, or other health professionals, like physiotherapists. The researcher with primary responsibility for looking after the trial at a particular centre (called the principal investigator) should have relevant qualifications and experience to run the trial and care for the
What types of clinical trials are there?
There are lots of different types of clinical trials, and they are not all drug trials. Treatment trials test the how well and how safe a new treatment or a new way of using a standard treatment is. The treatment being tested might be, for example, a device, a drug, herbal supplement, complementary or alternative therapy, or a new tool,
Is the evidence from clinical trials perfect?
The wonderful things about humans is our individuality. The lottery that is our genetic make-up means that we are all unique, and this means we can react differently to medications. It is not possible to test every new treatment on every person before approval, so researchers try to understand how a medicine works through testing in a clinical trial on