You will also be asked to give your informed consent. Your signature on the informed consent form says that you voluntarily agree, based upon adequate knowledge and understanding of relevant information about the trial, to participate in the medical research study. Participation in any medical research trial is completely voluntary. If you do not wish to take part in a study, or if you decide to stop participating in the study at any time, know that your decision will in no way interfere with the quality of medical care you receive. Randomized trials In some research trials, participants are randomly assigned to a treatment plan.
Randomization is like flipping a coin or pulling a number from a hat.
Because medical research must be kept very scientific, you cannot pick which protocol you want to be assigned to in a randomized trial. How new drugs are tested and approved On average, it takes 15 years before a drug tested in the laboratory can be tested on humans. Only five in 5,000 compounds tested in the lab ever make it to human testing. Only one in five of those are approved for sale in the United States. These trials are designed to test a drug's safety and to determine how it works in the human body.