Wage Payment Model for Human Guinea Pigs

Wage Payment Model for Human Guinea Pigs What would you do if you were asked to get paid to spend the entire week lying down on a comfortable bed for human clinical trial? There will be medications to take and occasional checkups that might be disturbing, but considering the good pay, some might think it is worth the pain. Many of the research subjects, who are often called “guinea pigs,” participate in the human clinical research for the relatively easy money-making process. Since growing numbers of healthy subjects are involved in the clinical research for the money than the humanitarian reasons, many people feel that there should be strict regulations on the payment for each clinical trial according to the time and the level of discomfort during the study. Christine Grady (2005), from the Department of Clinical Bioethics, suggests four different payment models for clinical research subjects: market, wage-payment, reimbursement, and appreciation methods (Grady, 88). Although paying the subjects with wage-payment model might under-compensate some subjects in relation to their regular wages, the regulations on their payment will create a sense of equality, build stronger employer-employee relationship, and reduce undue inducement among research subjects. Wage-payment model is known to be the fairest payment method, since the research subjects receive set amount of money for the time and effort they put into the research. According to Grady, research subjects are given the hourly wages to compensate for their contribution (Grady, 89). Apart from the set wages, the research subjects are paid for the extra amount of money depending on the level of discomfort and difficulty of the research. However, wage-payment model has more limitation on the payment than the other models in that it has little impact on recruitment. Carl Elliott (2008) elaborates in his article that most of the research subjects are the ones who do not have the income other than the ones they

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