Is Broad Focus Clinical Legit? Ups and Downs Revealed

Are you looking around those clinical trial websites and wondering which one of them you should try and which one you should stay away from?

Is Broad Focus Clinical currently on your radar, but you can’t seem to know for sure whether you should give it a shot?

You’re not alone. Many people get lost while trying to find their way around this. Fortunately, we’ve done the homework to give you the answer to the question: Is Broad Focus Clinical Legit?

We’ll tell you now, it doesn’t appear to be fraudulent, but it’s also not super straightforward either. Let’s talk about the details in depth, starting with an overview of the platform.

What Is Broad Focus Clinical? 

Broad Focus Clinical portrays itself as one of those clinical research websites that help connect eligible participants to paid clinical studies.

The idea of these paid clinical trials is to help advance medicine by allowing the researchers to test some (often safe) medications on some people in exchange for compensation.

As such, Broad Focus Clinical claim that they can connect you, a willing participant, to the study that you mentally and physically qualify for, providing that you live in the same state or are willing to travel.

How Does Broad Focus Clinical Work?

Here’s how the process is supposed to work:

• Make an appointment: As soon as you enter the official website, you’ll notice a highlighted text near the top that says; the policy has changed, and you need to make an appointment. That sounded straightforward until we realized that you couldn’t create an account on the website, so we had no idea how to set an appointment.
• Find the study that you like: The home page of the website lists variable clinical trials that you can choose from, like posture surveys, shyness, chronic muscle fatigue studies, etc. You are supposed to select the one with any signs or symptoms you could be experiencing.
• Provide some information: Once you go through the frustration of going through the study page (more on that soon), you’ll be asked to provide some contact information. No health or credit card information will appear there, but you will be asked to provide your email.
• Wait for a reply: After providing an email, you should expect a response with the details, including the studies near you that you qualify for.

Common Questions to Understand

Here are a few questions you might have in mind:

Are Clinical Trials Risky?

Whenever medications are involved, there’s always a small percentage of risk. That’s why even FDA-approved drugs still have a long list of possible side effects, some of which could be fatal to some people.

Clinical studies usually minimize that risk by keeping the clinical trial participants under supervision as much as possible, which often works.

However, truth be told, some trials involving dangerous diseases like cancer may have fatal results.

Will All Clinical Trials Test Medications/Experiments on Me?

You’d be pleased to know that the answer is no. If you’re a kind-hearted person who genuinely wants to help science advance, you can still do so without having anything administered in your system.

You could be part of the control group that tests the effect of a placebo (sugar pill) instead of the actual medication.

Of course, you’re more likely to not know whether the pills you take contain an active ingredient or not.

If you don’t like to be tested with medication, you may try getting paid for focus groups too.

A focus group is a group of people with different experiences who discuss a certain product before it’s launched.

How Can I Tell if a Clinical Trial Website Is Risky?

There are a few things to look for, like checking the physical location, online reviews, social media opinions, and the website’s overall appearance, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

Is Broad Focus Clinical Legit?

After some research and first-hand experience (yes, we tried it), we get the feeling that Broad Focus Clinical is a scam website.

Keep in mind that we’re not talking about fraud here. They won’t ask for your credit card information or anything, but you will be giving out some personal information little by little.

It’s a telltale sign of the robust network of scam websites out there. Let’s elaborate:

1. There’s No Organization

The first suspicious sign is how the studies are scattered around in no order.

You’ll be finding acne studies, next to anxiety studies, followed by muscle fatigue studies (which isn’t even a disease).

The ‘low organizational effort’ usually acts as our first red flag when browsing such websites.

2. The Design Is Generic

An established website with good authority will have its own photos, interface, and dedicated team of front and back-end developers to keep it polished. That’s not what we found here.

The photos displayed were generic stock photos, there was no branding of any kind, and the US map near the bottom was made by a cheap map creator. You can even find the link to the website they used there.

3. The Domain Rating Is Among the Lowest We’ve Seen

A domain rating or DR is a number used to track the activity and backlinking to a certain website. Long story short, the higher that number, the more you can trust the information present on the website.

For a website to be trustworthy, we should have a rating of at least 50, if not 60. Broad Focus Clinical has a rating of 0.5. Not 5; it’s 0.5.

4. Ads Are Everywhere

Upon testing tens of health-related websites, we started noticing a pattern that legitimate websites usually stray away from third-party Google ads.

This one, instead, has plenty of intrusive ads everywhere.

5. You’ll Run in Circles

Navigating their website led us in circles.

We found a study titled “Shyness/Anxiety Clinical Study” and tried to find out more about it.

On the right side of the screen, it was stated that the study would last for one week and that the compensation was $400 for two visits only.

Putting aside how that seemed too good to be true, we clicked on read more, only to be thrown back to the website’s home page!

So, we repeated the process, made sure that we didn’t do any hasty clicks, and ended up on the main page once more.

6. They Know Too Little About Science

When we were thrown back to the main page again, we gave the benefit of the doubt and assumed that we had done something wrong. So, we returned to the same shyness study and started taking our time around the page.

One of our team members, who’s a doctor, instantly spotted a mistake in the naming of the condition; social anxiety syndrome.

While this is too technical for people who haven’t studied medicine, there’s a difference between a syndrome and a disorder, and social anxiety is a disorder, not a syndrome.

That immediately made us suspect that whoever wrote those doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

7. Language Skills Are Nothing Short of a Disaster

After the syndrome hiccup, we headed to the blog page and started fishing for more medical issues, only to be bombarded by tons of writing mistakes and awkward sentences.

In every three sentences, there’s at least one with an obvious punctuation or grammar mistake.

Here’s an example that had us laughing: “Fungicides are known to cause a host of problems in humans as as well as in livestock animals.”

We’re not kidding. You can check it yourself here. A legitimate website would never have this alarming amount of writing mistakes, so this was a massive red flag.

8. The Social Media Links Are Fake

If you scroll down to the bottom of the main page, you’ll find what’s supposed to be clickable links to their social media accounts.

We clicked on each one of them, only to be directed to the home page of each website.

Once again, the benefit of the doubt. So, we manually searched for Broad Focus Clinical on every platform with zero results.

We still have no idea why those links are there if they don’t do anything.

9. The About Us Page Is Useless

You’d always want some background information as to who is running the website, where they are stationed, and whether they have a physical location, you can visit.

We did find an About Us page, but it didn’t provide any value. The page only contains some emails and an animated text bar of the “good reviews” left by previous participants.

After emailing every contact there and receiving no response, we can safely say that these emails are put there just for show.

Also, we found out that the listed physical address was 57 W 57th St, New York City, New York, 10019, United States.

Upon checking the site using both 2D and 3D Google Maps, we were unable to identify any sign of the company.

10. There Was No Positive Feedback Online

As with every legitimacy check, we dove into social media platforms. However, we couldn’t find anyone who said for sure that Broad Focus Clinical is a legitimate company.

Is Broad Focus Clinical Reliable?

For a company/website to be reliable, we need the following criteria:

• They need to have a minimum quality in their website and/or physical location if applicable
• Their website must be mistake-free and well-designed (with no stock photos)
• You need to find positive feedback about it online
• They need to deliver the service that they claim to deliver

Unfortunately, none of the first three conditions were present. So we went ahead and created an email to verify the last condition.

A couple of days after we provided our fake email, we started receiving promotions and newsletters of random services that had nothing to do with clinical trials.

In other words, Broad Focus Clinical doesn’t meet any of the reliability criteria.

Is Broad Focus Clinical Safe?

Since we created an email and tried the website ourselves, we can say that Broad Focus Clinical is fairly safe despite not getting the actual service.

Unlike other clinical research websites, like AcurianHealth, Broad Focus Clinical doesn’t scam your medical information or spy on your sensitive data. Also, since we didn’t provide an active phone number, we received no automated calls.

Still, we haven’t tried to call their listed number; (347) 989-4498. We might have started receiving such calls had we provided a number, but we decided to skip this one.

We were also able to find a valid SSL certificate for the website. Such a certificate isn’t something you can find on fraudulent websites. So, your money is safe as well.

Last but not least is data mining. Many websites would utilize your computer’s processor or secretly download data-mining malware to utilize your computer’s power.

You’ll notice excessive CPU usage if the website you’re on is using your processor for data mining. Also, if you close everything and still have high usage, you may have a data-mining virus.

We did all the necessary checks and found out that both of those scenarios weren’t present; you can rest assured regarding that aspect as well.

What Are Users Saying About Broad Focus Clinical?

It was challenging to find people discussing Broad Focus Clinical. The website isn’t listed on TrustPilot, Google Reviewers, or Better Business Bureau.

So, we had to rely on people’s opinions on different platforms:

• Reddit: Surprisingly, we found only one post on Reddit that talks about Broad Focus Clinical. People were still unsure of what to do, and they were clearly suspicious.
• Facebook: A user on Facebook named James inquired about the website as well. Someone responded to them, saying that Broad Focus Clinical was listed as spam on Craiglist.
• YouTube: Two YouTube users posted review videos about Broad Focus Clinical, highlighting many of the suspicious points we discussed above. However, they didn’t provide their emails or phone numbers because they found enough deal breakers. They also advised people to stay away from it.

Broad Focus Clinical Quality & Guarantees

There’s not much to say here. We were unable to find any form of guarantee online or offline.

If anything, we found a low score on Scam Detector and a scam label on Craiglist. So, there’s no way to label anything in Broad Focus Clinical as guaranteed.

Broad Focus Clinical Customer Service

To date, there are no customer services for Broad Focus Clinical. The only two methods to communicate with the website owners were emails (which we emailed and were left hanging) and a phone number (which we were too skeptical about calling).

Frequently Asked Questions

Similar Gigs to Research

If you’re interested in another way to make money on the side that includes clinical trials, consider having a look at those:

• Is Tech Research Studies Legit?: Tech Research collects and analyzes different opinions of people to improve a certain service/product in exchange for compensation. Is that too good to be true? Find out here.
• Is Wilkins Research Services Legit?: Wilkins Research Services is a marketing research firm that specializes in surveys and focus groups. Find more about them here.
• Is Zintro Paid Interview Legit?: Wouldn’t it be nice to be interviewed and get paid for it? Find out here if that’s even possible.

Wrapping Up

The bottom line is that you should stay away from Broad Focus Clinical if you’re interested in clinical trials.

Not only would you be wasting your time, but your email would be full of junk newsletters of products and services that you’re not interested in.

We recommend visiting trusted, well-established websites like clinicaltrials.gov. That’s where you can rest assured that you won’t be scammed.

If you found this information useful, you might want to pass it on to someone you know, especially if they’re not as careful as you before participating in shady websites.

Who knows, you might save someone’s privacy. Share this article!