Tracy Grierson, a research nurse at WMR Clinical Trial Centre, shared her story on what it was like to be a patient and researcher for the same clinical trial simultaneously:
In 2014, I took part in a trial calling for healthy volunteers seeking new ways to tackle lifestyle related health conditions such as Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease and Obesity. I found it fascinating and I learned things about my physiology that you normally wouldn’t have access to. For example, my true resting metabolic rate was tested and that was something I was always curious about in terms of managing my weight. The rate wasn’t what I’d fantasised at all, in fact my personal myth was dispelled and a normal metabolic rate was revealed. This was then bad news for the chocolate manufacturers whose sales I was about to curb.
Next, I underwent PET scans and that was a bit gruelling because as part of the protocol I had to sit for 3 hours in a chilled room, the idea being to make me uncomfortably cold before the scan. I was nervous about the radiation exposure of the 3 scans, too.
