Is it beneficial to my health ?

It might be. An example? If we take the case of a drug trial of phase 1, the medicine you will be testing will be intended to cure an illness of which you don’t suffer. Therefore, you will not benefit directly from the experience. However, during the recruitment procedure or the follow up visits, diagnostic examinations (blood tests or magnetic resonance imaging, for example) might be undertaken. Besides being useful for the experience, they might be the opportunity to have a health check-up or to detect at an early stage a disorder you might suffer from.

As for the clinical trials, they allow sick patients to be the first beneficiary of promising treatments.