Clinical Trials

This powerful site, a service of the National Institutes of Health developed by the National Library of Medicine, was included in TSI Online to provide you with a direct and easy way to enroll patients in clinical trials. This is a process we all should more actively support but often neglect because of lack of knowledge about the trials and the nuts and bolts of enrolling patients. This process is facilitated by using www.clinicaltrials.gov.

For instance, if you are a surgeon practicing in Santa Barbara, CA, and have a patient with recurrent breast cancer whom you think might benefit from being enrolled in a clinical trial, you simply type "breast cancer, Santa Barbara" in the Search Clinical Trials box, and all trials available for recruitment in your town will promptly appear. You then browse the trials (there are currently more than 200 breast cancer trials recruiting patients) and identify one that would be relevant to your patient. If she wishes to participate in the trial, enrollment is easily done online.

In addition to the main function of this site—linking patients to medical research—the site has many other information resources of value.