I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Author:Ben Goldacre [Ben Goldacre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

LIBEL

NMT Is Suing Dr Peter Wilmshurst. So How Trustworthy Is This Company? Let’s Look at Its Website . . .

Guardian, 11 December 2010

You will hopefully remember – from the era before WikiLeaks – that US medical-device company NMT is suing NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the conduct and results of the MIST trial, which sadly for NMT found no evidence that their device prevents migraine. The MIST trial was funded by NMT, and Wilmshurst was lead investigator until problems arose.

Wilmshurst has already paid £100,000 of his own money to defend himself, risking his house, and has spent every weekend and all his annual leave, unpaid, dealing with this, at great cost to his family. So what kind of a company is NMT Medical, which the British libel courts have allowed to hound one man for almost two years? And how trustworthy are its utterances?

Let’s go to its website and find out. On the front page you will see positive quotes from three patients prominently displayed, on a rotating banner (reload the page to see the full collection), accompanied by smiling studio photographs.

At this point we should remember that the outcome of the MIST trial – the study in question here – really was negative. It set out to see if the device permanently prevents migraine. One hundred and forty-seven patients with migraine took part. Seventy-four had the NMT STARFlex device implanted, seventy-three had a fake operation with no device implanted, and three people in each group stopped having migraines. The NMT STARFlex device made no difference at all. This is not a statement of opinion, and there are no complex statistics involved.

This might also be a good point to mention that the journal Circulation had to publish a lengthy correction for the MIST trial because the original paper failed to mention, for example, that Wilmshurst had declined to be listed as an author over concerns about how the study was conducted; that two of the devices were lost in patients’ bodies during the procedure (one embolised to the right atrium, one to the left pulmonary artery, both worrying, both were luckily able to be retrieved); and so on.

Back to NMT’s three positive case studies with their smiling studio photographs. They were all (it explains in the 2005 NMT annual report) treated with the STARFlex device in the MIST trial. Jean Richards says: ‘I feel so much better now. I don’t live in fear of a migraine coming on all the time.’ Zoe Willows says: ‘People at my new job have never known me to have a migraine. I’m a totally different person.’

There are several problems here. Firstly, two of these patients, it seems, are advertising devices they were not treated with. Jean is smiling and advertising CardioSEAL, a successor to the failed STARFlex device, although she was not treated with CardioSEAL; and Liz is advertising BioSTAR, but she was not treated with BioSTAR. I asked NMT why these patients were advertising products with which they were not treated.

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