Clinical Center Director Lauds Patient/Researcher Partnership
EPISODE #20
Uploaded: June 26, 2009
Running Time: 3:53
SCHMALFELDT: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. What is it about the NIH Clinical Center that makes it “America’s Research Hospital”? Well, for one thing it’s an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And for another thing, it’s the ideal location for clinical research.
GALLIN: What makes it ideal is the fact that it is a hospital totally surrounded by research laboratories. There is no other place in the world to my knowledge that has quite that environment. We have a hospital surrounded by 3,000 scientists and we have over 2,000 clinical scientists who partner with them.
SCHMALFELDT: That was Dr. John I. Gallin. Since 1994, he’s been Director of the Clinical Center, one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health. But that partnership Dr. Gallin mentions goes further than just the perimeter of the campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It reaches into the homes of folks all over the world who count on the NIH to find cures and new treatments for the diseases that plague mankind. And that partnership is aided by the people who agree to participate in the clinical research that goes on here every day. It’s clinical research that leads to the medical discoveries.
GALLIN: If we knew the answer we wouldn’t be doing the study. We don’t know the answer and that is why we are doing the study and what we need to do is learn whether the ideas we have are correct or not and them move forward with that.
SCHMALFELDT: But for all its state-of-the-art technology and brilliant scientists, it all comes for naught without the people who agree to participate in clinical research.
GALLIN: Because it’s really the future of medicine and health care. And for patients to understand the impact that they can have by volunteering to participate in clinical research is just fundamental to where we are going in the future. It is also fundamental in terms of offering them hope, for patients who have problems to relate to their whole families it gives their family hope, and of course it gives other people who may have similar problems hope. But hope goes beyond their own disease. It goes to other diseases that may be related. So a patient may participate because they have a rare disease, and understanding that disease may have a fundamental impact on understanding common diseases. That’s important.
SCHMALFELDT: Agreeing to participate in a clinical trial is a big decision, one that shouldn’t be entered into lightly. There’s a lot to be considered.
GALLIN: I would say, first you must understand what you are volunteering to participate in. Once you understand what the risks are, what the purpose of the study is, that you can quit any time without any ill feeling, then it’s a personal issue of whether the inconvenience of participating, whether it is worth it. And it’s a personal type of decision that everyone has to make. But fundamentally, if they want to do an altruistic contribution to improving the health of everybody, participating in clinical research is a marvelous way to do that.
SCHMALFELDT: You can learn more about how to participate in a clinical trial by logging on to http://clinicalresearch.nih.gov. And to find out more about the from NIH Clinical Center, including news about the medical research going on here every day, log on to http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov. From America’s Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I’m Bill Schmalfeldt at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
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