Comment by londons_explore
3 years ago
This sounds like the best way to do it.
The company would still need a blinded control group to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of any treatment.
However patients should be allowed to enroll for free into multiple treatment trials at the same time. For a given number of people and treatments, enrolling in multiple trials simultaneously gives more science output, and more chance of success for the participants, if you assume that ineffective treatments rarely are very harmful.
"However patients should be allowed to enroll for free into multiple treatment trials at the same time."
But this would likely mess up any data, you can get. How can you tie the cure or the bad sideeffects to any drug then?
Apart from that, sure, I think patients should have the right to try anything.
You just end up with a matrix of treatments. Whatever results you observe from someone undergoing treatments X & Y goes in the "X&Y" box, not the X box and the Y box.
But you would need much more participants in all trials, to make up for all those new combos that you now have to consider.
Also: I can imagine that most of the patients would be eager to engage in all possible treatments. You might not even have a control group that did not participate in the study of the faulty drug X
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Bad side effects caused by participating in other trials would happen with equal frequencies in the control group.