“This must be too small to be of any importance!”
Have you ever considered not bringing up the “small little thing” that bothered you, at work or in life?
What if that “small little thing” ends up being worth billions of dollars?
Clinical trials are full of accidental discoveries: drugs that are meant to solve one problem turn out to work amazingly well, or better yet, for another. The most famous one is of course Viagra, initially investigated for cardiovascular diseases.🫀
Zyban – a drug originally meant to treat depression, has a side effect of patients stopping smoking. The cigarettes didn’t quite taste right during the treatment.🚭
The recent blockbuster – Ozempic – originally intended to help diabetic patients, found a much broader use as a weight loss drug.
Cases like that could never have been discovered if it wasn’t for patient feedback: bringing up the “small little thing” that bothered them.
These discoveries only happened because enough clinical trial participants complained, because an investigator listened, and because a study coordinator entered it into the study documentation.
So the next time you’re thinking that “this must be too small to be of any importance”or even “I’m too embarrassed to bring it up” think about the patient in the cardiovascular study that brought up sildenafil’s side effect and forever changed the pharmaceutical industry. 🙋🏻♂️
