Okay, so I’m unemployed and need money. I suffer from depression, anxiety, and IBS. Surely people are testing new drugs for all three of those ailments.
I found out from a perfectly healthy FOAF that he made $2500 in two weeks testing new antibiotics.
I’m willing to take the risks. I’m willing to endure nasty side effects. Still, I’m not exactly seeing ads in the newspaper for this kind of work.
How can I get in on this?
There actually are ads in the newspaper for this kind of work, but you may need to be in a bigger city or near a medical school.
So try to find a local med school and poke around on their web site–there should be a list of research studies that are seeking volunteers.
Thanks. I’m within a short drive of Hershey Medical Center, and within a slightly longer (but not too far) distance from Philadelphia and Johns Hopkins in Maryland.
I’ll take a look on their sites, but if anyone else has something more specific, it would be appreciated.
Oh, and if there are ads in the newspaper for this sort of thing, why am I not seeing them? According to Wikipedia, Penn State Hershey Medical Center “is considered one of the best centers for medical research and treatment in the United States.”
That hospital is less than fifteen minutes away from my house.
Why aren’t they advertising any research experiments?
If a research campus is that close, you could just visit the location itself and see if any advertisements are posted in the building hallways. I see lots of advertisements for research participants in the hallways of campus buildings, including the homes of departments such as psychology and computer science. Last week I got paid $20 for one hour testing the relevancy of news stories provided by a new search algorithm. Admittedly I found out about that opportunity from a mailing list rather than a posted advertisement, but when I went for the experiment there were more such opportunities posted in the hallways.
What company’s search algorithm was it? Do you even know? Was the news turned up relevant?
I never learned whose program was running behind the scenes, and until you asked I just assumed it was an in-house algorithm that needed a bit of fine-tuning. I only saw the search query and then a sequence of news stories, each of which I had to rate for relevancy (yes/no) before I could proceed to the next one. Some were quite on-topic, but others only tangentially related, containing at most one sentence relevant to the event that prompted the search query.
Move to Nashville.
The various University Hospitals & Pharm companies are always adverstising in the papers, & even on TV commercials.
Also, we have good general employment conditions.
Beware, though, of the risks. A recent trial in the UK left several volunteers comatose for a few weeks. One had to have several fingers and toes amputated. Only go for it if you are prepared to risk the same (or worse) happening to you.
Most medical volunteers are paid as healthy volunteers. These are studies to insure that the drug is safe for the general population.
Efficacy studies, done on people with symptoms, are usually not paid, but all study related expenses are covered.
I was a healthy volunteer back in the '70s. Most of the people used were medical and nursing students. They didn’t have advertize the various studies, they just put up notices around the medical center and gathered enough people that way. We were always hungry.
Each study paid pretty well, for a reason. In three of the studies I participated in, one or more volunteers had to be taken to the ER for adverse reactions.
I think I did a total of five over a three year stretch. There is a waiting period between studies, so you can’t do them like a full time job. This is so they can be sure one study drug isn’t affecting the results of a different one.