I’m wondering because pharmaceutical ads can list some pretty major side effects, let’s say like kidney failure or “even death”. Does that mean that in the human trials a significant enough percentage of the test population died? Seems kinda messed up to pay people to test medications if they can end up getting seriously hurt..
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No humans are given drugs until *well* along in the process. We don’t just give random chemicals to people to see what happens. Drugs are developed with at least some known characteristics based on their molecular structures and are extensively tested on cells in labs and then on animals before any human.
Drug warning labels legally have to list every medical condition that occurred in any person participating in the trial even if there was no link to the drug being tested. In other words, if I was diagnosed with lymphoma while participating in a trial for an asthma medication, they still have to list “lymphoma” as a possible side effect even if there’s no evidence that it was caused by the drug.
And deaths are taken extremely seriously. Any deaths during a trial must be reported and investigated. If even a single death is linked to the drug being tested, it can lead to the abandonment of the drug entirely. Even a single death during a drug trial typically makes the news, so no, there’s not some cemetery somewhere filled with the bodies of people who died because of a drug during the drug trial because that’s extremely rare.
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