The Student Life: Books, Beer & Paid Medical Trials

Article provided by GSK Clinical Trials which enables volunteers to review current clinical trials and to join their volunteer panel.

Looking to boost your depleting student funds? Participating in paid clinical trials is rarely an option people consider, but it’s not as scary as it might sound.

The greatest thing about being a student is the time you’re given to explore the world, both within your chosen subject and the physical world in which you’re studying.

Life for an 18 year-old student can be a rabbit warren of choices leading you through a labyrinth of attractions and distractions.

There’s a vital ingredient required to grease the wheels of choice: money.

Your passage through university will be peppered with financial woes, this is a given. Whether you’re being financed by your parents, or you’re working your way through uni with the aid of loans – or a bit of both - there will always be the sense that there is never quite enough cash to get you everything you want and need.

This is especially true if you’re studying a longer course such as architecture, or medicine, or a course, like art, that demands that you are forever supplying your own equipment and materials.

Part-time jobs are great for keeping you afloat and if you’re good with money you might save a little, but most of us aren’t so good with cash and in these pressurised times when the price of bread is as unpredictable as the state of the Euro, running into difficulties is common.

This is when the emergency measures are introduced and you ask yourself the dreaded question “What can I sell?” Usually the valuable items are the ones you really need, or the ones you can’t bear to part with and frankly, why should you?

Enter the left-field option.

Pharmaceutical companies who are developing new drugs are always looking for healthy people between the ages of 18 and 60 to participate in clinical trials.

Paid medical trials offer up to £2000 in compensation, plus reasonable travel expenses.

Interested volunteers are given a full medical before being accepted onto the volunteer panel and those who are offered a place on a trial meet with a participating doctor to learn exactly what is involved before consenting.

Your medical data is treated with the upmost care and volunteers are able to take part in up to four trials per year. Up to £8000 per year is a reasonable-sized sigh of relief when the credit card interest begins to bite.

If scenes from V for Vendetta or images from war camps are streaming through your head as you read, rest assured that clinical trials are not at all like this.

All drugs from the humble aspirin to the most sophisticated cancer drugs have had to go through a series of trials to assess how effective they are in tackling the condition in question before coming to market.

In some cases trials require patients who have the disease or condition the drug is supposed to treat, while in other cases studies are conducted using completely health people.

Studies are conducted in comfortable, full-equipped facilities with highly trained staff.

Your participation in GSK trials will mean a contribution towards developing drugs that will treat and perhaps cure illnesses in the future.

And you get paid.