Most people in the United States are aware of the frequent outsourcing of jobs to other countries, but how many know about the outsourcing of patients? I was quite surprised and appalled when I learned about what has been going on in India. It is much cheaper to conduct drug trials for American drug companies, including the ever-infamous GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson, in other countries like India. There is an incredible pool of drug trial participants available in India, but for quite unethical reasons. Most of these drug trial participants do not know that they are indeed participating in clinical trials. They are instead being told that they are simply recieving free treatment. This is, of course, appealing to the patients, most of which are extremely poor and living with chronic medical conditions that are expensive to treat. Completely trusting of their doctors, they sign consent forms that require them to acknowledge that they are aware of possible side-effects of which not even the doctors themselves could possibly be aware! Some consent forms only require thumbprints on the bottom of contracts in a language the patients do not understand. On top of this, psychiatric patients afflicted with manic and psychotic symptoms were taken off of medications that were helping them and switched onto the trial medications which had no effect at all.
Some of the patients in these drug trials saw a great decline in their health as medication side effects only made their conditions that much worse. One man was left paralyzed while another could no longer speak or walk. Some were later informed that they had participated in a drug trial. They reacted not with the outrage that I and many other Americans may have but with only solemn looks and sad explanations of how they would not have consented to such a thing had they known. Some families settled with the fact that, as poor people subject to the exploitative nature of foreign countries, things like this are bound to happen. One woman explained that she had no way of pursuing any type of litigation against the American companies, unknowledgable about the workings of the American legal system or even how to proceed. This deeply saddens me and provides for me only another example of the state of the world that sometimes overwhelms me.
I give thanks to independent and public television and news for allowing me to keep in touch with my world. For more information on the drug trials in India, go to linktv.org.
