496
Every damn time.
(lemmy.world)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
so how do you choose which humans to experiment on? bearing in mind that any sort of incentive will automatically select for a particular subset, and randomness will "obviously" need to exclude a particular subset
A researcher should offer a sufficient compensation package to get enough volunteers after explaining the risks. They should get independent medical advice too.
They can still randomize within the volunteers with treatment / placebo, and maybe use quotas, but they'd just have to extend their trial period until they'd achieved a measurably representative treatment and control group and enough volunteers to test the hypothesis to the required level.
This type of non-random sampling may very well have to be done anyway, for example if they needed the power to test efficacy and safety in all the potential dug interactions or co-morbidity scenarios. Not to mention any diagnosis requirement will also screen the sample which could be influenced by health care system resources and policies, not necessarily pure morbidity. So I think they can deal with non-random sampling in med research perfectly well.
So the poor and desperate.
Sounds like military recruitment which is one ethical step away from conscription.