When was the last time you took a drug that made you feel better?
Before that drug could be prescribed for you, it had to be tested.
Not just in the lab, but on humans. Here in Arkansas there are people getting drugged 24-7, putting their lives on the line, for your health.
Little white mice are used for medical experiments – guinea pigs, too – many times, leading to medical breakthroughs.
You might call 35-year-old Charls Bogar of Fayetteville a guinea pig. He’s an epileptic and is letting a drug company use his body 24 hours a day to test a drug.
“I thought I’d be bored to death and thought I was in a prison,” Bogar said. “but I get to go down the hall and get coffee, I get to work and watch TV.”
And every so often, he gets to play the guitar.
The drug company is very secretive and won’t tell us what it’s looking for in this study. But we do know that Bogar has been here for several days and watched closely.
In a 20 minute time span, his blood pressure is checked – lying down and standing up. Then, connected to an EKG, he is checked again.
Next, he is given the IV drug for the experiment, and then another EKG check, followed by yet another blood pressure check.
Same routine, several times a day – for about a week.
Bogar admits to feeling like a human guinea pig.
“Yeah, a little, sometimes. But they’re very nice,” he says. “There’s a nurse in here about every 45 minutes asking if they can help.”
Commercials can grab your attention – with offers of money to become part of a human trial. And now, some clinics are starting to use social media sites such as Facebook to find willing participants.
Online, there are several websites looking for candidates for all kinds of drug trials.
There’s one looking for healthy non-smokers, with compensation raging up to $1900.
But Dr. Victor Biton, a board certified neurologist at Clinical Trials Incorporated in Little Rock says that some patients aren’t volunteering to make money.
“What we do is we reimburse patients for expenses,” Dr. Biton said.
“We do not offer payment. We do not offer that because the whole idea is for patients to first volunteer to do that.”
But in this billion dollar industry, drug trials can go wrong and cause harm.
According to Dr. Biton, drugs go through many different levels of testing prior to being offered to humans – test tubes, tissue samples, mice and sometimes guinea pigs.
If it ever reaches the human phase, it’s only tried on a small group before it ever gets to a large human study.
Plus, there’s what’s called the “Institutional Review Board,” which oversees all drug studies to ensure that volunteers aren’t misled, misused or put in danger.
“We do everything in our power to keep the patient safe,” Dr. Biton said. “In reality is rare that we see any problem in the studies we've conducted. If there's the slightest issue, we just stop the drug.”
Which brings us back to Bogar. He’s been an epileptic since high school. His current medication has worked well for years, and he’s a family man with a good job. So why is he doing this?
“Well, I qualified,” Bogar said. “And actually, I had time to take away from the family and I wanted to help people out as much as I could.”
This experiment today might just save a life in the future.
“Look at any of the disease any of us experience, and get the treatment for it,” Dr. Biton said. “How did this treatment come to be, how is this treatment available to you?”
And that is what Dr. Biton reports that most of his patients say.
They want to help themselves, and sometime just want to help other people.
