8 Reasons You Should Take Part In A Clinical Trial

Science is an industry full of unanswered questions; is Alzheimer's disease contagious, does drinking fizzy drinks increase your risk of heart disease, is there any point in taking vitamin pills each day? These are all questions that can be answered by completing a clinical trial.

An example of a clinical trial may involve randomly assigning people to 2 groups; giving one group of people a drug you think might prevent heart disease each day, and giving the other group of people a placebo (in this case something that looks like a the drug but which has no effect). The result of the trial will give you information on whether that drug prevents heart disease or not. 

Other trials may not use placebos at all; in this example one group of people could be given the test drug, and the other group a drug which we already know prevents heart disease. Trials with this sort of design can prevent waste and help science and medical treatments advance - if the test drug prevented heart disease more effectively we could start using that instead of the one already in use.

Isn't that cool? You could help to answer a huge and important scientific question, and you don't even have to work in a lab.

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