Two years ago, my wisdom teeth broke through my gumline.
I had two part-time jobs in a metropolitan city that added up to a low salary without benefits. I’d heard radio advertisements for studies of pain relief medications wherein healthy adults could be paid a few hundred dollars to have their wisdom teeth removed and enjoy in-patient vacations (free wireless and cable!), in exchange for work as guinea pigs– they would be administered experimental pain relief drugs or placebos and assessed by a staff of monitors.
I was hardly upset about a diet of beer and ice cream with the pain of the growth, but I was concerned that the teeth would continue to grow in and shift my front teeth. I was also about to be in a wedding party, and I planned to eat steak.
I responded to the ad and went in for the consultation. I read for three hours in a dirty, occasionally crowded waiting room until my name was called– with short breaks every half hour to call a friend or family member and see what they thought.
The experience was traumatic for me– my instincts distinctly let me know something was wrong as soon as my screening begain. For seemingly no reason, I began to cry when I met the doctor, and I perceived him to be anything but professional. I was sent out of the building and told not to come back. When I called a few weeks later to try to get his name, the receptionists I talked to refused it. I am certain there is no record of my visit, save my phone bill.
My wisdom teeth are now out, and I don’t think a few hundred dollars would be worth the experience of being administered a placebo. (But have you heard– half of the doctors in a survey admitted to doing it. Read it on Slate.)
Some would disagree.
In the January 7 issue of the New Yorker, Carl Elliott wrote about the business of getting drugs tested and approved– fast and cheap. Once a pharmaceutical company patents a drug, its goal is to get it on the market as fast as possible. To get it approved, it will likely contract a research company that offers compensation to eligible individuals for participation in a study. The human guinea pig often takes on a great deal of pain or discomfort, even risking death, for relatively easy cash. In my estimation, “easy” is very much relative. For some, it’s like a job– a steady income source– and an enema or endoscopy would be as routine as filing an expense report. As you might expect, many of these companies operate outside of the U.S., but there is no dearth of able and willing participants here.
Pharmaceutical Product Development, Inc., or PPD, is based in Wilmington, North Carolina. PPD was the company that would have arranged and studied my wisdom tooth extraction, and PPD is one of the companies that the article points to as a prime example of questionable ethics. The corporate MO is “No one gets medicine into the system faster.”
Like Elliott, I want to know– at what cost?
Virginia is one of 12 states in which PPD operates, and its Richmond site is one of two “bioanalytical labs” that has successfully completed 45 FDA audits in their 22 years of existence (site). It’s difficult to gauge how professional a company it is from its website, so I searched for truth in the public forum: blogs.
According to one anonymous blogger on MedZilla.com,
I worked for PPD for 6 years and was told to do some very unethical things, or else. I finally decided my reputation was more important than the great salary I was receiving at the time.
Others spoke more favorably of their experience with PPD, in the context of being able to begin monitoring patients faster than they would with other companies. This makes me slightly nervous.
In our capitalist nation, I suspect “big pharma” is more motivated by its stock performance than selfless benevolence to speed up the drug approval process. However, today’s Washington Post leads with the headline, “Supreme Court Lets Stand Experimental-Drug Ruling.” Wrote Robert Barnes:
The court, without comment or recorded dissent, let stand a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which said the terminally ill have no constitutional right to drugs the agency considers safe enough only for additional testing.
Catch-22.
I couldn’t help but wonder how the University of Virginia Hospital conducts research. I found a call for participants in a medical study exactly where I thought I would: Charlottesville’s craigslist volunteers forum.
Are you living w/ HIV & do you sometimes use cocaine?
Reply to: cartproject@virginia.edu
Date: 2008-01-08, 12:23PM EST
Would you like to be a volunteer for a research study testing an investigational counseling method?
You could earn up to $300 for completing 3 assessment sessions and 6 treatment visits over a five-month period.
If you are HIV+ and sometimes use cocaine, you could be eligible.
Transportation available if needed.
For more information, call: 866-307-4931 OR 434-982-6750
OR email: cartproject@virginia.edu
The study is being conducted in Richmond and in Charlottesville by researchers in the UVa Health System, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Studies. Karen Ingersoll, PhD is the principle investigator.
I called the local number and spoke with a knowledgeable, forthcoming research assistant. I said I was planning to write about medical research for a local website, and he proceeded to tell me that the study is doing exactly what the listing suggests: researching addiction and testing medicines to help curb alcohol consumption. At the time, they were looking for a handful of participants of a total of 50 to 60. Participants would simply take urine tests over a period of months. The study is being conducted by the relatively new Center for Addiction Research and Education. Before I hung up, I was given the phone number of the doctor leading the study and encouraged to call.
But I already had all of the information that I needed.
Have you ever guinea-pigged? What is your take on guinea-pigging for steady income? What do you make of this?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Tagged as: approval, Blogs, Central Virginia, Charlottesville, fda, medical, Questions, Richmond, tests, University of Virginia, UVA
while i was in undergrad at uva, one of my roommates told me about a study the hospital was doing for a new asthma medication. my roommate, who had asthma, was already enrolled, but she knew that they needed control participants too. basically, for about $200, i had my lung capacity tested, inhaled some helium, and got an MRI. it was pretty easy cash in my opinion, so i looked into other trials offered at uva. and then, i thought, things got kind of weird.
for instance, there’s the twice yearly cold study, where students “apply” to have the privilege of spending their thanksgiving or spring break in a local hotel after being given the cold (or the flu? i can’t remember) and taking echinacea pills or a placebo — students that get accepted to the cold study act like they’ve won the lottery (i think they get around $800, along with a free hotel stay and food for the duration of the trial). it may be easy money, but i think i’d rather do some actual work than have my school inject me with a virus.
I used to work in pharma, and lots of colleagues (all male) did trials at work for the company. Most of them involve 24 hr urine collection, so you have to piss in a 2 gallon plastic container and carry it with you EVERYWHERE to ensure no one spikes it with something. It was a common sight to have someone eating their lunch with their container in full view on the table. I wanted to have them right there on the cafeteria table, sending salt shakers and pepper pots crashing to the floor in a flailing mass of lustful human desire.
I was poor as a church mouse, and applied… only to be told that they didn’t like to take women on because of the potential liability if one became pregnant during a trial and the baby had deformities. So most drugs that are in a Phase III study are tested on XY’s only. Skewed data anyone?
Floozy - I was just going to write about a friend of mine who had to pee into a jug which he carried around with him on the subway and in all the bars! We are the same person
But did you want to hump him?
@Jools, I have a buddy who did that flu study. He said it was pretty much the most boring thing on earth because you can’t leave your room, you have very little interaction with people and you get sick.
I didn’t test drugs, but I did test shaving supplies - blades, creams, after shaves for Gillette for a while. Some were done from home, others, we had to go to their shaving lab (really) and shave in front of two-way mirrors using a prescribed method. I didn’t think it was too bad, until one day I swolled up like a big ol’ balloon in an allergic reaction to something in the shaving cream. Thought it was a pretty good time to stop after that.
In my desperately poor days of youth I would have been happy to have tested anything, but I couldn’t figure out who to call. I did one time volunteer (for free lunch) to be a hairsalon test rat, and went from really long blond haired lady to strangely butch, dark and short haired lady which was extremely traumatic and took me years to recover from.
Serves you right for going to the Strapadictomy and Eatmeout Hair and Nail Emporium
UVA is pretty good about their studies - they have a hospital-wide bioethics board with either subcommittees or a separate board that oversees all studies.
There have been innumerable papers written about what consitutes proper compensation vs. coersion, and many research hospitals cap the compensation to avoid overstepping these bounds. It’s a hard balance, because the more you pay, the more likely you are to fill your study, but you are also more likely to get a poor sample set (professional guinea pigs). That’s why they stopped paying for blood donors - the amount of Hep B blood they had to screen out of the system dropped significantly once drug addicts couldn’t earn their wages by donating blood.
The outsourcing is a whole different can of worms. My favorite dilemma (I was a bioethics minor so I love this stuff) - when we test drugs in ways that would be below standard of care in the US, but are above SOC in the host country, are we being unethical?
Oh, wow, 2of4. I know exactly what you mean. I did practically the same thing (for a stupid ass boyfriend) and paid for the privilege. To this day, I mentally knife any hairdresser who tells me how I just have to have short hair. Some hair trauma just never goes away.
When I was younger, I took part in a study run by a major hospital/Ivy League medical school that was researching tryptophan, the amino acid in food that supposedly makes us sleepy. The deal: for three weeks, I would pick up specially made meals from the hospital. Once a week, I’d have a vial of blood drawn for analysis. At the end of the study, I’d sleep over in the hospital for one night.
I realized that I was put on the low tryptophan diet. The side effect of not eating tryptophan is that you get extremely tired and your brain doesn’t produce the normal chemicals that make you happy (I believe it affects serotonin levels). My roommate was also taking part in the study and was set to start the routine two weeks behind me. She dropped out after seeing how I was doing and encouraged me to do the same, which I did.
It was a horrible experience. BzzAgent is the closest I get to being a guinea pig these days.
I have a friend that did a “poop study” for Johns Hopkins before, during, and after a trip she went on to Central America. She was given different vaccines before the trip (never was sure if placebo or not) and some small vials with which she had to swap her excrement at various times while on the trip and send the vials back to the lab at J-H. The study was about resistance to diarrhea and other food-borne illnesses in third world countries. No dysentery!!!
Needless to say, she got paid about $1200, I think, and only had to swab her own feces multiple times, mail it, and get a few shots. Sell that body to science!
(I really like your screen name, icenine)
Never been a drug tester, but we did have small incentives to be subjects in psych labs at my university. usually painless and decent happy hour money.
I’ve sold my eggs 4 or 5? times. The world needs more skinny artist bloggers, I figure.
And I support human testing over animal testing.
You didn’t sell them to the diner, did you? Becuase I had this smokin’ hot omelette
YES I concur shen. Human testing all the way (seriously)
geez silm.
Shen… surely yours would be marketed as Human Egg-Beaters due to the skinny factor.
Speaking of, I just made myself a delicious dinner omelette. With Egg Beaters, no less. How a propos.
Don’t blame me if I off my game. I am transitioning from cigs to nicotine lozenges which the directions say not take within a half an hour of drinking (anything). While drinking is when I need the damn nicotine most
No, they went to mothers who couldn’t conceive and wanted to have hot babies.
But I did read in Jane magazine one time about an artist who sold her real eggs in a little jar like caviar. Ew.
And Flooz, the Egg-Beaters comment made me barf in my mouth a little. Way to remind me that I too am edible protein.
beats groundhog, shen
Sorry Shen… twas in poor taste. My bad.
Oh, and Silmo:
One time in Honors English (Yeah, at SHS, Yupster!) we had to write our version of “A Modest Proposal”…The jerk boys in the class wrote about building a “celestial” wall at the border to keep Mexican immigrants out of the US. I wrote that we should use convicts for medical research.
OH gawdddd shut up. I’m still scarred by that Silmo. I mean, my dad must have been broke.
And Flooz, it wasn’t poor taste. I just have an all too vivid imagination.
Has anyone here ever donated sperm? I hear there’s a sperm bank in town.