Clinical Trials

Clinical trials are a bit of an oddity. In such a civilized and advanced culture as ours, it seems out of place to have an entire industry revolving around the mistreatment of volunteers. People are paid (usually miniscule amounts of money, by the way) to be injected with random crap by doctors who assume no liability for what happens to them as a result. Let's say you start having uncontrollable bowel movements after a trial. Now let's say that they never stop. In either case, you won't be helped in any way by the people who gave you the drug. You knew what you were signing up for, basically.

With all of this horribleness on the surface, I have to imagine that there are even worse things underneath. Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that any time there is a public perception of something (no matter how awful the public perception is) there is always a darker underbelly. After the break is a handful of articles about people who died doing clinical trials.