You are helping potentially not just yourself, but you're potentially helping all the people with a given disease who are going to come after you.

One young mother with pancreatic cancer saw her disease practically disappear.

And then a non-smoker was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given just six months to live.

Well, I have to tell you, he lived

in additional four years and he actually had the opportunity to also travel the globe.

A young man received a stem cell implant to cure a condition that now helps him produce

healthy red blood cells. Now, all of this was possible due in large part to those things

called clinical trials.

And as research into various conditions and diseases increases, well, so does the money going into clinical trials.

Get this. Global spending on clinical trials is estimated to reach $68.9 billion a year by 2025.

That's according to Grandview Research, a market research company.

So why get involved in clinical trials? Well, a lot of good reasons. Clinical trials provide an opportunity to get access to medication or therapies that aren't yet available to others.

And here's the deal. Successful clinical trials have led to patients beating diseases or adding many more years

of quality of life.

If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with the disease, odds are that you said to yourself

or somebody said to you, well, have you looked into clinical trials?

You're probably wondering a lot of things.

Who pays for them?

Do they work?

What about placebos?

How do you know if you're actually going to get one?

How do you know if the clinical trial is really working?

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