What do I need to do to participate in a clinical Trial?

When you and your doctor developed a mesothelioma treatment plan and talked about your long term care options, you more than likely discussed the possibility of one day participating in a clinical trial. If your cancer is returning in spite of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, the time to start considering a clinical trial might be now.

A clinical trial gives people an experimental disease treatment developed in a laboratory to see whether that treatment is safe and effective for patients. Trials are tightly controlled and highly professional, but there is still a risk of patient harm and good results are not guaranteed.

On the upside, trials may produce major medical breakthroughs that permanently alter the treatment paradigm for a disease. Many of the treatments of tomorrow are only available through clinical trials. Still, you shouldn’t participate in a trial before you’ve tried more tried and true standard treatments. Those treatments, after all, only became standard after they were tested in clinical trials.