- Hello, my name is Susan Owenby with Nashville General Hospital.

On today's "For Your Good Health," we are going to be talking about clinical trials.

Clinical trials are research studies that are used to help determine treatments for various diseases.

I think it's important to know all your treatment options and the physician should be offering all treatment options, including any clinical trials that are available.

But no, it's not mandatory and you should never feel pressure to do it.

What we also know from medical science is that drugs affect races differently, how they tolerate the drugs, how they respond to the drugs.

Whether it be hypertension, cancer, diabetes, your race helps determine how you respond to that treatment.

So it's of utmost important to get all ethnicities, all races involved in clinical research 'cause then we can find the best treatments for them.

There are two well-known types of clinical trials: prevention and treatment trials.

Prevention is really how do we prevent the disease from occurring in the first place.

The treatment trials is where you are diagnosed with an illness and then we're looking at a treatment for it and then that's where we're looking at standard of care and adding the investigational drugs with it.

You know, a drug may be the greatest thing in the world, but it makes them feel horrible, and we need to know that and we need to know how to counteract those side effects.

Absolutely, there are benefits to being part of a clinical trial.

The benefit of being able to have access to the latest, newest drugs that you wouldn't have access to if you were not on a trial.

The other benefit is the fact that people that are on clinical trials get better care.

They're monitored more closely.

They have their own research team that follows them.

They have people that they can connect to.

When we consent a patient, we consent their whole family 'cause their support system has to be on board with helping them to get to their appointments or helping them answer the questions or making sure they take the medicines when they're supposed to.

So, it's really a collective effort.

I'm a firm believer that we're never gonna cure anything if we don't do clinical research 'cause that's the only way we can find answers for all of our questions.