Medical Research
Every human being that has ever taken a licensed drug or vaccine has benefited from medical research. Every cough and cold medicine and even more serious drugs for diseases such as cancer, have gone through a rigorous screening and testing protocol. From the time a drug is theorized in a laboratory it will begin a journey that takes anything from 12 - 18 years before it can be made available for general use. This process costs billions of dollars and is a highly regulated practice which involves multiple testing and evaluation procedures.
Health research can be divided into two main categories. Biomedicine is concerned with the theory and knowledge of a new drug. After a new drug is developed in a laboratory, its effects will first be tested on animal subjects. This stage in the research is primarily concerned with gaining as much information as possible on the behavior of the drug and its toxicity levels. Once the drug has proven to be effective in preclinical trials it will then be put forward into the next stage of its development which is known as clinical research.
Clinical research will then determine the safety, effectiveness, and the correct dosage for the new drug. The drug will have to pass through an evaluation process consisting of a number of controlled tests on human subjects. These tests consist of four different phases and each phase will involve evaluating the effects on a progressively larger group of individuals. Once the drug has reached phase three it will then become available for marketing and phase four will continue to evaluate and improve on the drug.
Medical research is not only concerned with the development of new drugs. Many studies are carried out to observe the patterns of diseases and the effect our lifestyle can have over them (or even altering them in biomedical engineering. There are research programs dedicated to the prevention of certain diseases and investigate whether a lifestyle change can have an effect on their progression. Diagnostic research deals with researching better ways to diagnose and identify disease in patients.
Medical research is not only for the prevention and cure of disease but also for homeopathic medicine and the benefit of taking health supplements such as vitamins and minerals. Medical research also helps to improve veterinary medicine and develop vaccines against disease which can be passed from animals into humans such as the recently developed swine flu vaccination.
Medical research has become a highly controversial topic with many activists protesting against the use of animal subjects for the development of new drugs. There is also concern at the testing of drugs on human subjects, before the long term effects of the drug are fully known. Without medical research we would not have the many medicines and vaccines we have come to depend on as part of our everyday lives. Many diseases which were once fatal to humans are now easily cured and the symptoms of other diseases can be controlled in such a way that the patient can live a much longer and happier life.