Black people don't participate for medical trials. It could be due to mistrust of doctors or fear of being experimented on, but new research says that blacks are 40 percent less likely to volunteer in clinical trials. For the record, I was an avid participant in my college's psych department trials, and an avid casher of the checks they provided. But that's beside the point.
The researchers asked a series of questions to learn why people did or did not want to volunteer. They found that 58 percent of blacks, compared to just 25 percent of whites, said they believed doctors use drugs to experiment on people without a patient's consent. In addition, 25 percent of the blacks, compared to 15 percent of whites, expressed the belief their doctor would be willing to ask them to take part in a study even if the study might harm them. And 28 percent of blacks, compared to 22 percent of whites, said their doctors would be willing to expose them to unnecessary risks.
Without question, the medical community needs volunteers of all races in clinical trials, but I wonder if placing the blame solely on the individuals or an entire race is ignoring the responsibility of researchers to try harder to recruit a diverse group of volunteers.
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Gee, I guess we didn't forget the message of the Tuskegee experiments.
I don't know what kind of waiver you sign to participate in medical trials, but given that every drug advertised these days has some horrendous side effect, I would be reluctant to submit to any trials that could end up with me growing a second head and not being able to sue over it. Just doesn't sound like a winner to me.
I thought the same thing reading that. I'm no one's guiniey pig
Black folk better get with the program. I whored my body out to science many times in sophomore year and ESPECIALLY in junior year. Sold bone marrow four times I think. Had two bronchoscopies. Had to inhale a bunch of unpleasant things and rate them. Between these and a hell of a lot of psychology and economics things, I made at least $3,000. That's a whole lot of trampy LVL X outfits and boxed wine.
daria,
Your children and your children's children are going to have tails and fish gils and shit.
I never took any medications or experimental anything. Everything I did involved things being taken out of my body or just general procedures. No x-rays. Why would I hog all my bone marrow when they could be using it to do leukemia research? Bronchs = tube down lung, not uncommon or painful but unpleasant. The things I inhaled were all safe esters. If you use any products with "fragrance" written on it, you're exposing yourself to them
My mother use to work for a drug research company doing the tests on volunteers. She told me that so many people don't even want to know the side effects because they're so desperate for money, and don't care what the risks are. I thought about doing it for about a day in school, then came to my senses. Sorry but I'm glad more Black don't participate.
For drug studies, patients are definitely given info. I considered one with Pfizer as well as another with my alma mater. People choose to ignore it.
The real problem with this whole thing is that there is less information on how people of different races react to drugs. BiDil, a drug for heart patients, is FDA approved for black folk. If used in non-blacks, it's far less efficient and would count as off-label usage. Why does it work better in black people? Nobody knows. Who knows what else results in different outcomes. Another issue is that most of these drugs are tested on men because they don't want to be sued in a couple of years for your infertility. They only take women with hysterectomies. There aren't very many healthy 18 to 50 year olds who get their tubes tied nowadays.
daria,
If you have a baby boy, you can name him 'Gil'. jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjk
As a former scientist who worked in big pharma designing studies to determine the efficacy of new compounds, I can say that minorities should proceed with caution. I was shocked by the latent racism of some physicians and researchers.