I just personally feel it would be a cool and easy way to make some summer cash; does anybody know how a person goes about doing this?
Thanks
Watch TV…no seriously. A lot of drug companies will solicit guinea pigs through TV advertising; they’ll usually list the necessary requirements they are testing for and the potential pay, though generally they don’t want perfectly healthy people to come in for test. As an example, my father was having stomach problems and saw an add to try out for a new medication for a specific type of stomach problem. He called the number, answered a few questions out his problems, and then waited for an approval. He never got it, assuming his symptoms were not part of the problem the drung was intended to treat.
The Clinical Research Voulnteer Program is the place to go for government sponsored research.
Or, google “medical research volunteer” + your location to get something in your area.
um … this is completey wrong. You have to test drugs on healthy people to find out about things like side effects.
I don’t know where you got the information that they don’t want healthy people. They in fact ONLY want healthy people, or possibly people who might have certain conditions that don’t affect the testing at all.
Testing on sick or unwell people is only going to skew, and screw up, the tests.
Saluki_fan, do you have a craigslist in your area? They often have posts here (Boston) for medical research candidates.
Check the bulletin boards at local “teaching” hospitals - ones associated with universities/medical schools. They might have signs up asking for participants. It’s possible that their websites might have similar listings.
Funnily enough my friend has just applied for this and is going to undergo a two month test shortly. He found the advert for the test centre in the back of a magazine (they advertise in magazines like Timeout, The Big Issue and FHM in Britain) and applied, went through elligibilty tests and was accepted. You have to be fit and healthy (although they do have tests for people with asthma and smokers etc.), drug free and available to stay in the test centre for fairly long periods. He is getting £500 a week for his test so will rack up two grand when its over.
I found a note posted on the board at the submarine base hospital [New London, CT] asking for guinea pogs for auditory testing.
I spent about 4 hours one day a week for 6 months listening for embedded signals in white and pink noise. Thrilling…the most excitement was the day I stopped testing for 2 hours because I was hearing the background sounds generated by the PC they tried to generate the tones with when the regular tone generator went down. [well, they were paying for my acute hearing…]
I think I ended up making about $3000US all told
Does this happen to anyone else? Hours after you post, you realize you posted partially incorrect information? And you feel a burning desire to get back on asap so that you can fix it???
Anyway, I think Flander is correct. There are studies where they want you to be “not completely healthy” - i.e., they want you to have the sickness for which they are doing the study. Other studies want you to have no medical conditions at all; others don’t care if you have a condition that has already been determined to not affect the test.
Sorry I said they always wanted you to be “healthy.” I was thinking of a certain type of test that I have applied for and was rejected. Based on the signs I see for these research projects, lots of them do want you to have the illness on which they are conducting the study.
Also, your local newspaper may run ads from organizations seeking volunteers–the Health section of the Washington Post comes out on Tuesdays and always has a section for research volunteers.
It is a good way to make a quick buck, although the studies that need healthy people want you to be REALLY healthy.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was a normal control for many clinical studies. A University related teaching hospital was where I got started. Sleep studies were my favorite.
I got to know one of the MDs in the Clinical Studies department and she would do prescreening for me, sending me the heads up on studies that were a combination of minimal pain/danger and maximum payment.
My college had a medical school, and they had a bulletin board devoted to what test subjects they needed. I’ve also seen ads in the back of the City Paper and other free weeklies (though I’ve noticed those ads tend to be looking for drug users or folks with STDs).
All of the above.
Who they want for a trial really depends on what they’re looking for. If, for instance, the investigators want to gather basic research information on the differences between people with a particlar disease, and healthy people, they will enlist both “normal volunteers” and people with the specific disease of interest. One example: While working at the NCI, I volunteered for a study at the NIMH on OCD. They wanted to see the differences in brain activity between healthy people, and people with OCD, using PET scanning. So I got MRIs and PET scans, as well as a chunk of cash. It was only mildly invasive (small catheter in the arm to deliver the O-15, no big deal). The fact I was getting shot up with a radioactive isotope of oxygen, which generated high energy gama rays in my brain via the annihilation of matter and antimatter, didn’t really bother me at the time. Money is tight for the young academic scientist, after all. Today, I might feel differently. Anyway, I still have a printout of the MRI, performed just to check if I had any structural anomalies before admitting me to the trial, which I love to show to any and all who are interested. “That,” I say proudly, “Is my brain!”
Now, if you’re trying to test the efficacy of a drug, sometimes it doesn’t make much sense to enroll healthy people in your trial. How are you going to show improvement if they’re already well? So, they’ll advertise something like: “Do you have OCD? The NIMH is performing a trial of an experimental medication for the treatment of OCD. Qualifying subjects will get six months of etc. etc., blah blah blah”. So, for this kind of trial, only people with a particular sickness need apply.
In Kansas City, we have ads for Quintiles on the radio every two minutes or so. They do a lot of these types of tests.
My coworker is in a study for testing the effects of an epilepsy medication on birth control. She got $3000 for two months of taking pills and three or four overnight stays.
Most people have to be within 10 pounds of their ideal weight, so that leaves out just about every one I know.