Disastrous impact on medical trials  We need medical trials. It is important to have large groups of recruits, which can often be very difficult: a problem with the speed at which new treatments for rare diseases is the rate of recruitment (and therefore the length of time taken to complete the trial)1.  If you pass this motion, trials will face large problems with recruitment, an area where there are already sometimes shortages2: if people can get access to the drug without a) the possibility of being placed in the placebo arm or b) inconveniences of being part of a trial, there is a reduced chance of them choosing to enter the trial.  Consequently, the sample size in trials will be decreased. This will have a couple of outcomes:  First trials will take a longer time to be completed as a result of fewer volunteers and this is bad for patients currently taking the new drug as well as for future patients. This is because it will take longer to determine the safety of the drug meaning if it is dangerous those taking the drug will be taking it for longer before the danger is fully appreciated and if safe then the drug will have taken longer to get to the market than it could have. The longer the trials take to complete, the more people are forced to decide whether to take the drug in the absence of reliable information. This means that, at such a stressful time, people are effectively forced to gamble the quality of their remaining years with the hope of gaining a few more (new drugs are unlikely to be ‘miracle cures’. Rather, they are likely to extend life by driving the disease into remission).  It is important to remember that, at this stage, it has yet to be determined whether new drugs are more effective than old ones, and second, that the sorts of drugs used to treat terminal illnesses tend to come with substantial side effects. As a consequence, if many people are using a new treatment before trialling has been completed, they may be using something that is not effective and has side-effects that significantly impact the quality of the last years of their life.  Finally, the longer trials are delayed, the greater the chance that future trials will be biased by media hype ad speculation. It is both easy and profitable for media outlets to exaggerate early successes of a drug with claims and headlines such as “wonder drug”.  This is problematic because of the tendency towards confirmation bias on the part of researchers: the greater their expectation of a positive result, the more likely they are to alter data to receive that result. Note that this is not as a result of deliberate fraud or deception, but rather, the result of any number of small decisions that, cumulatively, create a large result.  1 Jenkins, John, ‘Considerations for Clinical Trial Designs’, U.S. Food and Drug Administration,   2 ‘Volunteer for research at UNClinicalStudies.org’, University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center,