Clinical Trials: What to Ask Before You Say Yes | Joshua Paterson

What is a clinical trial? What's the definition?

There's a couple of ways I guess we could And there's many different types of trials.

There's not just, I think a lot of people think about clinical trials and they think new medicine or new, you know, a drug that's being in development.

But that's not always the case.

Sometimes we look at medicine, sometimes we look at devices, you know, psychological therapies, models of care.

These trials, when we talk about clinical trials, I think the main important takeaway, though, is to remember, as a participant who's looking at joining a trial, that you're still a patient or a participant first.

You're not a guinea pig.

We're not going to do things that are unethical or un-moral.

We're looking at answering some questions.

doesn't remove your right to having access to good health care and it shouldn't be considered as such.

Something I think is important to understand is how before you do a trial because it can feel like a little bit like oh I have an idea I will try a trial and I will do it with human but it's not usually the case there's a lot of things to follow and yeah I think it's important to understand the process from the beginning

I think the the process it goes through many steps generally what we come up with first or what we're trying to do first is better effective treatment, and then looking at what ways can we do that and getting the data that we can show that that works and that it is working.

So there's different phases of trials.

We have what's called phase zero all the way through to phase four.

And depending on the phase depends on what part of the question we're wanting to answer.

So things that we call early phase trials, phase zero is kind of pre or risk component here.

Then we go into kind of phase one, phase two, early phase testing.

reaction because we're all humans.

We're all different.

We all have different makeup.

Different people, as you may know, respond to different drugs differently.

So that's why when we get to these stages, we go through these phases where we kind of have these stop checks at each phase that allow the researchers, the safety committees that are attached to these to really look at each section and say, look, So by the time you get to kind of phase three or four, you might be looking at testing this on thousands of people or multiple sites.

Whereas the phase one, two, you might only be looking at 10 to 30 people.

And so it really depends on where you come into a trial and where it's up to.

necessary risk.