Dr. Erin Schenk, a lung cancer researcher, addresses common concerns about clinical trial participation, from fear of the unknown to worries about receiving a placebo. Dr. Schenk explains how trials are designed with patient safety in mind, why participation is always voluntary, and how the health care team can support you every step of the way.
Dr. Erin Schenk is a medical oncologist, lung cancer researcher, and associate professor in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center. Learn more about Dr. Schenk.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
What would you say to someone who might be hesitant to participate in a trial?
Dr. Erin Schenk:
Yeah. I would encourage them to ask questions. Often, when there is a center with clinical trials, they have research coordinators who can sit down with you and your family and your loved ones and show you, what does the calendar look like? So, when do you need to be where, for how long? So, that can give you a sense of the things that you would be asked to do while participating in a clinical trial.
That’s number one and number two. I think it’s always very important just to know that the clinical trial is completely voluntary. So, if a patient enrolls on a clinical trial and decides they no longer wish to be part of it, we will respect that. So, it’s really a generous gift that you’re giving not only to the medical knowledge now, but future patients by participating in that clinical trial.
And we respect a patient’s decision-making and when it’s maybe too much or they just don’t want to be a part of it.
Katherine Banwell:
Some people are concerned that they might be given a placebo in a clinical trial. Is that still the case?
Dr. Erin Schenk:
Right now, for a number of clinical trials, there are opportunities where everyone receives the experimental medicine or the cancer drug we’re testing. Those are often trials that are Phase I or sometimes Phase II trials. If a patient is on a Phase III trial, that’s where the medicine has been really promising in some of the earlier phases, Phase I and Phase II. And now we need to test it against the standard of care. So, another way of saying that is that the medicines you would usually get, so wherever you were in your cancer treatment process or the stages and whatnot, you would get the medicines off the shelf that we would give to you anyway.
Those are the things that are established that we know are helpful. That’s what is standard of care. And what we do is we compare the experimental drug to the standard of care.
Sometimes the drug being tested is combined with some of those components. Sometimes it’s on its own. But I would encourage you, if there’s a clinical trial you’re exploring, to talk to your doctor about if there are multiple things you could receive on the clinical trial, meaning maybe there’s an experimental arm and maybe there’s a standard of care arm. But right now, especially in this era, testing the new and under development therapies that we have, we are not testing it against placebo alone. You would receive appropriate cancer treatment.