[@Vilageidiotx] I study pharmaceutical sciences so I've seen and studied human trials, the pay is good for it considering you just sit a room all day playing xbox and pool. Basically they're on the 0.01% risk threshold I mentioned earlier and that isn't even the potential for death but merely for more serious adverse effects. These trials are basically a must for all new drugs as the final testing stage. I suggested reducing the stringent rules on them to allow for more rapid development. Say a 90% threshold for adverse effects and a 1% threshold for death. This might sound unappealing to some but this is an amazing good offer considering the risk involved. A standard trial held today pays out between $1000 to $3000. I'm sure companies would offer much more considering the increased risk for these more dangerous trials. A person living in a third world country spends an average of $2 or less a day. You'd essentially be offering them to cure their existing ailments (so you can get accurate tests) and offering them years of livelihood. This is the same as todays trials which still carry an inherent but smaller risk why is why people are paid for them. To change this into a more relatable example... imagine you have a serious ailment. If you don't do anything about it you'll die within several years. Theres a surgery option available but there is a 10% risk of death but if it succeeds, you can live life as per normal. Their ailment is their current lifestyle. Their surgery would be these trials. When you phrase it this way, you realize that it isn't as bad as it sounds and no, this is not sugarcoating it. Pretending that their lifestyles isn't as difficult as I've described would be the sugarcoating.

Regarding the regulations and exploitations; this will always be a debate. IMO as the past has proven time and time again, exploitable and abusable systems can be controlled if proper effort is invested into it. You say that these hospitals might attempt nasty stuff (you have no FUCKING idea what they already do) but I say you can stop them. Make the punishment for breaking regulations severe. Hire an ethics community. These are just random suggestions. There will always be exploitations as any system will have but you can keep it to the absolute minimum if it is properly done. Take the law system for example.

[@mdk] 

[i]This is what I'm disagreeing with. Or rather, the insinuation that this is an injustice. "First, do no harm." That is the bedrock of medical ethics and it should be. If you want to harm yourself to save others, that's your prerogative -- but medical institutions can't make that call. It's hairy enough with organ donors coming into an ER. Open those doors and things get miserable really darn quickly. [/i]

What I said already applies to existing trials today and since you've done one before, you should know of it. Companies will make you sign a form that basically washes them of responsibility if anything happens. Nobody knows what they're drugs could potentially do which is why they conduct those tests in the first place. There is nothing wrong with my statement because it is in fact used in modern day trials. There are deaths in modern day trials as well. This is more or less my response although I don't understand where you derived [i]if you want to harm yourself to save others[/i].

[i]What you're advocating is skipping the part where the life-saving machine was tested and proven effective on animals first. What you're advocating is Joe Scientist coming into the patent office and saying "Hey, I bet if I chop open a sick guy's chest I can hook up a motor and probably keep him alive. Send me a hundred brown people and I'll prove it." What I'm advocating is exactly what happened -- the life-saving device was tested, proven effective, and successfully implemented with no human suffering, and the safe practice was refined over time as our understanding improved. It didn't save everybody, but it didn't kill anybody. That is a night-and-day distinction.[/i]

I am baffled as to how you do not see the flaw in this statement. First of all, his experiments on animals did not yield a 100% success rate nor anything close to it while in modern times, drugs have to yield a near 100% success rate with a low as possible risk before it is tested on humans. Isn't this the false equivalency you were talking about? [i]It didn't save everybody, but it didn't kill anybody.[/i] And this is contradictory to what you said earlier. So patients with terminal illnesses should be allowed to offer themselves as test subjects, no? And no, I am not advocating some random doctor suggesting a mad scientist experiment. How is anything like a 90% threshold of risk comparable to that? A 90% treshhold should sound like a paradise if you were okay with the history of the heart-lung machine.

[i]The only moral thing to do in that situation is to give you a meal for a fair price (I know, I know, you hippies reading this are saying FREE MEAL! bite me). The person taking $10k for a cheeseburger is stealing from you. That person is objectively terrible. What I've been arguing all along is that we continue to practice humane research to help people safely. And I've already linked like a handful of new treatments (just from the last couple of years) to demonstrate what should be readily apparent just from the state of the world you keep moaning about -- western medicine works. Ebola broke out in Africa, not here, and we still cured it in weeks. We're doing everything right, far as research is concerned, and the crazy part is you already implicitly recognize this by comparing the US-Africa health situations. [/i]

He is indeed a terrible person. However the point here is that if you aren't going to contribute anything to me, then don't stop that man from selling me his burger because at the end of the day no matter how horrible the deal, its still better than my current situation. Otherwise I wouldn't accept the deal and then this whole debate about forced into it would be off. And I am bringing up the many situations where how the current standard western medicine development DOESN'T work. While medical breakthroughs still occur, they are occurring at a rapidly lower rate than the past despite our increased knowledge and advances in technology. This is because of all the tape that's laid around clinical trial technicians.

[i]Bullshit. That's exactly how it works, and if you're not already doing it, you don't actually care.[/i]

I mentioned this earlier. People care... but they don't care enough. Thats me! If I see a beggar in front of me, I'll give a few dollars but I'm not going to send funds off every month to people I will never meet in my whole life even though I feel sad for them. Besides the point isn't about me, I have no idea how you wrapped this around me. The point is that people prevent these experiments because they 'care'. Yet these people are doing close to nothing to help those they 'care' about. When ethics is brought up, people make a big hoo haa. You could get a government to do a nationwide survey and ask if support should be sent to these third world countries. I'll tell you most people would say yes, at least I believe that much in humanity at least. Then I tell you what, the government then charges them money in order to raise funds. You'll see a lot of angry people. Fucking hell, these are the people that already complain when taxes are redistributed into helping their own country people. I'm just saying people need to realize how they're being gigantic hypocrites by so strongly advocating ethics and why we should protect the rights of others.

[i]You can't solve everything =/= you can't do anything. =/= you should just use them as lab rats instead.[/i]

People will give them money, food and healthcare in exchange for the experiments. The money, food and healthcare that people would never otherwise give for free or at least not on such a substantial level. They win because (read my response to villageidiot in this same post) and you win because you get medical breakthroughs.

[i]What? Exactly that is 'done and implemented,' and it's because the populace is concerned about ethics. Rightly so. You have an unreasonable definition of what's 'relatively safe to the individuals,' and that's where your frustration is coming from. If you get rid of that, you'll see that the system already actually does what you want it to do, better than how you want to do it, without killing people. Stop trying to fix it with murder.[/i]

No, my frustration comes from the hypocrisy of the masses. Which I mentioned earlier in this post. Everyone raises a big fuss because they 'care'. When in reality, they don't care. My frustration is that I wanna yell out to them "hey, you don't really care so stop making yourself feel better, OTHERWISE do something that ACTUALLY shows you care! Otherwise, shut your mouth about ethics."

E: And if you somehow divert this again to it being about me. Then I will repeat it again. I care to a certain degree. And I know what that degree is. I'm not a saint nor am I devil. I'm not going to work my life away to slave for others. If you say that because of that, I have no right to argue about other people, then I can't complain. However, just read what I've typed and take it with a grain of salt before changing the topic back to me and whether or not it makes sense.