gen Z has a reputation for being “boring”. Not only do they prefer to go to the gym rather than the pub, stay at home and go to bed at 9pm rather than go to nightclubs, they are now refusing to take part in medical trials. Way back when (way back) when I was a lad, it was all about the bar and the clubs and the medical experiments. And I still have the scars to prove it.
the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency It states that all human medicines must undergo human testing before they can be made widely available. This is mainly to investigate any unwanted side effects. Treating the common cold is no good if it also causes your reproductive organs to go down. Alternatively, this side effect may be useful when studied further: Aspirin acts as a blood thinner; Some antidepressants limit nicotine withdrawal. It must have been a hell of a day when they tested Viagra and discovered some unexpected side effects: Its original purpose was to treat chest pain caused by angina.
Things went wrong, of course. the 2006 Theralizumab clinical trial Due to autoimmune diseases, all six volunteers who were given the drug developed severe swelling, deformity and life-threatening organ failure. So, there is a lot to worry about for Generation Z – a generation that is already nervous. But by not volunteering, they also risk missing out on new treatments that won’t win approval as trials stop. They should keep in mind that if drugs are not tested in young people, researchers may miss side effects that only occur in young people. Someone needs a word. And that person is me, having volunteered for more than my fair share of medical trials when I was what Generation Z is now.
At the University of Nottingham, Queen’s Medical Center has offered a variety of easy payments. People conducting medical trials are only allowed to pay for reasonable time and travel coverage, never as an official incentive. But as a skinny student, the amount of money I considered as an incentive was somewhat less than what the organizers had expected. You can spend an hour taking psychology tests for £20 cash, the price of a night out. I remember looking at strange graphs, not sure if I had been given a color blindness test, or if it was a Rorschach test to see if I was a psychopath. You could have a new type of “invisible” stitch that has come loose. There were rumors that amputating your big toe and stitching it back up two weeks later paid more than your student loan. True or not, I was really tempted.
I later lived in Sydney, where, having established myself as one of those journalists willing to do anything for money, I was challenged to do just that. I was paid £20 to sit under UV light for three hours at the Australian Photobiology Testing Facility to try out the effectiveness of sun creams. I was paid £35 to take a load of anti-ulcer medication, or a placebo (I was never told which, but it tasted like refreshing), at a cancer center in Sydney, give two blood samples and urinate into a bottle. I almost got paid £900 for taking ropinirole, used to treat Parkinson’s disease, over 10 weeks at GlaxoSmithKline’s drug research unit, but that involved giving up alcohol, which at the time was a clinical trial in itself.
My ultimate resistance came when I answered an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald from the gastroenterology department at St George’s Hospital, and was charged £200 to have a long, 17-lumen silicone tube stuck up my nose, down my throat, around my entire digestive system, and out my backside. This was – need I explain – to help study the relationship between the distal ileum and diffusing proximal colonic pressure waves.
Intubation made me feel nauseous when Ed Harris’ character inhales liquid oxygen in The Abyss. I then had to advance the tube an inch up my nostril every 15 minutes. It took three days to get the “full body floss” and the tube out the other side. I then had to lie still under an X-ray machine for five hours with the tube attached to the machine, and watch movies on a TV turned on its side (I only watched Mission: Impossible 2 rotated at a 90-degree angle), so that activity around the ileocolic junction could be measured, the results of which, I was later told, played a major role at a conference in the United States.
Was it worth it? Maybe, though for me money was a big motivator. Have you helped humanity in the future of medicine? And in a small way, yes – and that’s what should really matter. Would I do it again after all these years? Well, considering that now I also prefer staying at home rather than going out clubbing, maybe not. But someone has to do it. Come on, Gen Z. Pull your pants down in the name of medical science, like I did.