Wednesday, June 13, 2018
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2018/This-Might-Hurt-a-Little/
they spelled my name right. decent article.
they spelled my name right. decent article.
For Robbin Stewart, being a lab rat has become a second career. About 15 years ago, feeling burned out, the free-spirited public interest attorney closed his law practice. Now he makes enough money as a test subject—$20,000 in a good year—to subsidize other pursuits. While sequestered in clinical trials, he’s used the time to write court briefs for pro bono cases and craft blog posts about politics and soup recipes.
He’s done about 40 studies, driving from his home in Indianapolis to clinics around the country, including at least five at AbbVie. “I never thought I’d do it for that long. But it’s such an easy habit to fall into when they are offering you that kind of money and you’re not really doing anything. You just hang out for a few weeks or a month or whatever and get a nice check.”
Stewart is similarly unconcerned about the risk. “Most people ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Apparently, I lack that gene to be cautious and sensible,” he quips. He, too, has had very few bad experiences. But there was that time at AbbVie when a doctor struggled to get a tube down his nose and into his large intestine. “They had kind of a tricky time threading it through the stomach, so I was in there for 45 minutes while they were playing with the tube, trying to get it right,” he recalls. He says the clinic didn’t adequately warn him about the pain that would be involved. So he wrote a complaint—and has never since been selected for an AbbVie study.
Participants are not always forthcoming about adverse reactions, Stewart says, for fear of getting booted from a study. (He got kicked out of one recently after developing a rash—not because of the test drug, he thinks, but because of a cheap detergent he’d used. And he’s not happy about it. “It cost me $1,000.”) “You can get banned at any time, for any reason,” he says. “So if someone is experiencing a side effect, they are not going to run and tell the doctor. It’s bad science and bad policy—and defeats the whole purpose.”
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