If your health gets worse while you’re in the trial, the people running it will try to find out whether it’s the treatment or something else that’s making you sick. Treatments can have mild side effects, like headaches or stomach aches, or dangerous ones that lead to serious illness or death. If you get sick, tell the people running the trial immediately. You may be taken off the treatment and / or be given a different treatment. If the trial is comparing two treatments, you may be offered the other one. Or you may be asked to leave the trial. You can choose to leave the trial at any time.
It’s important to get the phone number of a doctor or nurse who’s working with the trial who you can call at any time of the night or day, in case of emergency. If you get sick in the middle of the night, doctors in an emergency room may not know what to do, because the treatments in trials are experimental.
