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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

True story, I once went to try out being a subject for one of these take a drug then do some tests with an EEG hooked up, etc kind of study. They never once mentioned it, but then in the informed consent form there was a whole section agreeing to a spinal tap. I was like wtf, and they said "sorry we gave you an old version on accident" then replaced the form with one without the spinal tap section.

The study seemed legit so it probably was just an honest error, but I wonder how many people agreed to a spinal tap without realizing what it was.

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Research/academia can certainly be kind of screwed up, but I doubt that any ethics board in a developed country is going to okay a study that involves tricking people into a spinal tap. And all the consent forms patients are asked to sign before agreeing to a procedure, the ones that tell you about the procedure and the risks in excruciating detail, are as much for the protection of the doctor as the patient. That way, if the patient ends up paralyzed, at least they can't claim you didn't warn them when the case goes to court.

So unless you were dealing with a single rogue Mad Scientist, I'd assume that was an error.

I dunno, csf samples (and corresponding data) can be quite valuable.

For example, I know someone who had a spinal cyst removed and learned that to this day they do not understand if the fluid is coming from inside or outside the cyst. We lack basic mechanistic information about these issues because there is so little data (then again the papers I looked at that did have such data only checked averages and otherwise weak/incorrect analysis).

There isn't really any trickery here. If at some point they were to come at you with a needle and you said, "uh, I didn't agree to that," that's where it would end. Consent forms for treatment are only valid until you withdraw consent.

>'come at you with a needle and you said, "uh, I didn't agree to that,"'

Keep in mind this would happen after you are already drugged up. I don't want to say the compound but it is one which would be thought to make you more agreeable to such things (and from my experience definitely works).

Maybe it was a sugar pill and they were just screening for who would read the fine print.

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