Experimental Drug Testing Research Paper

If you were laying on your deathbed and there happened to be a cure for your disease, wouldn’t you want to have access to it? Even if the experimental drug was not 100 percent guaranteed to benefit you, at least you are giving yourself a chance to survive. On the other hand, it can be extremely difficult for clinical trial director’s to get the data that they need, without it being rather skewed. Generally, a clinical trial would not want to accept a patient who is terminally ill for the fact that it might be too late for any new drug to help them survive. Based on that transpiring multiple times throughout a clinical trial, then the data for that drug is going to be atrocious. A possible life-saving drug is going to be simply thrown out the
Through the use of the FDA’s drug approval process, certain drugs can be eliminated from testing after proven that it would be unsafe for humans. The “Right to try” laws provide terminally ill patients with experimental drugs that are in the early stages of testing, which are drugs that doctors have little to hardly any knowledge about. Under the safety aspect of things, the “Right to try” laws sound like you are basically giving the patient's poison and seeing if they will take the bait. Although, many dying patients would not as to what they are putting into their bodies, especially if it has the potential to cure them of their disease. Most of those patients look at it as if, they are already dying of their illness and the worst thing that could possibly happen would be dying slightly earlier than they were intended to. Frank Rockhold argues, “More important, the whole purpose of large clinical trials is to fully evaluate benefits and risks, and short-changing that is not in patients' best interests” (Okie). Looking past the patient’s beliefs, you have to look at what the doctors and physicians may believe in for whether it would be right or wrong. The doctor does not want to develop an experimental drug that will be immediately be given to human patients, and most likely end up killing a large number of terminally ill patients. First of all, that would look bad on the doctor for releasing a hazardous drug, even though he did not know the effects of the drug. Second of all, patients would not want to receive drugs from that particular clinical trial, which will in turn give that trial a bad reputation. Third of all, this would be occurring throughout the entire United States of America, and could possibly make clinical trials a huge bust within itself. Under the circumstances that the “Right to try” laws are written under, there is in no way that you could