••• CLICK HERE FOR AMT202 •••
Despite this sort of terrifying story, we still receive the following question fairly often. Today, it came from Mark from London:
As a student, I am constantly strapped for cash and have been looking for ways to make a little extra money.
A friend recommended to me clinical trials. Some of them are pretty well paid!
So answer me this: would it be worth signing up for clinical trials? How risky are they, and is the money worth it?
I feel uncomfortable gambling with Mark’s future health and wellbeing by answering the first question; as for the second, the more money, the riskier the trial, so bear that in mind as you decide which means more to you.
Perhaps you readers can answer the third question in the comments, because for some reason I feel sure that some of you may have been lab rats in your time.
February 3, 2012 at 12:56 pm |
You could also go for Psychology trials. They don’t pay as much but they tend to be less invasive and you can usually do a lot more of them because, unlike medical trials, they don’t tend to affect each other.
February 2, 2012 at 2:19 pm |
Ooh, I can be a little bit of an authority on this one! I ran clinical trials for 5 years on a variety of types of drugs and subjects, and on the whole they are very well run and pay handsomely. Payments are effectively made for your inconvenience and unpleasantness of the trial, so the longer and more invasive / greater risk of side effects, the more money you can get. Studies I worked on varied from testing a probiotic drink for a few months (for relatively low reward) to testing anaesthetics where subjects were knocked out for about an hour (with lots of tubes in them) and the money was extremely good for what worked out to be a few days inconvenience. It was always very popular with students, the unemployed, retired people and aussies who were lifeguards in the summer and guinea pigs in the winter (cue mental image of surfing small rodents).
Make sure you know what you are signing up for (required under the ethical guidelines), and that you are happy to complete the whole trial, as noncompleters get only a fraction of the money and mess up the statistics.
Overall though you should have a great time, spend most of your time in bed, either asleep or chatting to nurses, eating prepared meals, watching tv, and simply allowing people to steal a bit of blood regularly.
Oh and don’t be a typical student and smoke a fattie between trial periods, you will be caught and kicked off, sorry.