Dispensing with the Truth by Alicia Mundy

Author:Alicia Mundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Alex had decided to bring in two medical experts on pulmonary hypertension, figuring extra firepower couldn’t hurt. Alex and Maureen had convinced one of the authors of the IPPHS, Stuart Rich, to be his first expert. His second doctor would be Maureen’s former colleague, Robyn Barst.

Neither Rich nor Barst, who’d known each other for twenty years treating PH, had let themselves get dragged into court before. But, as Barst explained, “We felt that we had to do something about this. It was like a mission. We’d seen what the diet drugs had done.” Barst and Rich had both watched the numbers of patients with PPH go through the ceiling. Dexfen users from Europe and all over the United States were flying in weekly to Rich’s clinic in Chicago and to Columbia Presbyterian of New York, where Barst ran the pulmonary division.

Testifying for two days, Barst made a strong witness on the medical issues of how the disease progresses and the link to diet drugs. But what really came through, Alex liked, was her compassion. She’d testify during the day, and wake up at four in the morning to hold a dying patient’s hand. Unlike the medical experts for American Home Products, she could talk from experience about real people she had seen, “begging to die because they’re sick of the pump, they’re sick of fighting to breathe.” Asked by AHP lawyers about “lucky” PPH patients, who only have to take oral medicine instead of the Flolan catheter, she’d blown up: “Are you crazy? Do you know what these people are facing?”

When Barst met Mary Jo and Tom Linnen, she hugged them and cried. She would bring humanity as well as credibility to the witness stand.

Rich blew Alex away, but for different reasons. His background on the front lines of PPH was phenomenal. Because of his work on the IPPHS he could handle the epidemiology and explanation of how risk is calculated, as well as the clinical medical issues related to PPH. His presence in the deposition room was startling, almost overpowering, unlike so many medical experts who shrink into the woodwork.

Rich had a secret to share in the deposition. After he characterized Wyeth’s actions as “dishonest, misleading, personally threatening,” AHP’s irate lawyer demanded Rich give concrete examples of each instance. Rich obliged. When he reached “threatening,” he told them about his appearance on the Today show in August 1996 to publicize the IPPHS and warn Americans about the dangers of the diet drugs.

After Rich had returned to his office, he got a call from Marc Deitch. “He was unhappy with my characterization of the drug having serious safety concerns, and warned me to be very careful about things that I said from this point on, because ‘very bad things could happen.’”

After that call, Rich didn’t do any more media on the diet drugs, because “[Deitch] said it was very dangerous for me to talk to the press.”

Put together with the Servier letter to Wyeth about “neutralizing” Rich, Rubin, and Abenhaim, it was pure dynamite.

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