Volunteering for clinical trials

It takes courage to volunteer your own body to help try out an unproven medical treatment.

IT began innocuously enough with a dry cough.

But it was a stubborn cough that just wouldnt go away, despite being bombarded with a few rounds of antibiotics.

So, the doctor advised English teacher S. Kamakshi to go for some blood tests to check for infectious diseases.

But it wasnt an infection that turned out to be the culprit; it was something far more dreaded.

A full blood count revealed that the then 44-year-old had an unusually high number of white blood cells floating around in her system.

This immediately triggered an alarm, and she was sent off to the hospital to do a bone marrow aspiration a procedure where a needle is inserted into the pelvic or breast bone to obtain samples of bone marrow fluid in order to examine it under the microscope.

That test confirmed her diagnosis; it was leukaemia, more specifically, chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML).

Chromosome crossover

Also known as chronic myelogenous leukaemia, this relatively rare condition is a cancer of the white blood cells that usually occurs in adults.

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Volunteering for clinical trials