Ignorance, Litigation Pose Real Threat

Imagine starting every day in pain - unable to tie your own shoes or stir the sugar in your coffee without grimacing. You can’t hammer a nail or rake leaves or even cast a fishing rod. The pain is always there and getting worse as you watch your capabilities diminish and your quality of life decline.

That was the life I was living when I lost the use of my thumbs to osteoarthritis in the late 1970’s. For me, the inability to use my hands, was a devastating blow; and, like anyone facing a debilitating illness, I searched for a cure.

Today, 16 years and two operations later, I am again chopping wood, riding my horses and living a full life, thanks to one of the most controversial and, I believe, most maligned medical substances on the market today - silicone. I think it’s time for the other side of the silicone story to be told for the thousands of people who suffer needlessly - but could be helped.

In 1980, I had my first surgery to replace the fluid in my left thumb joint with hard silicone rubber. Nine years later, I had the same procedure done on my right thumb.

For me, it was a miracle. Silicone literally gave me back my hands and, with them, my life.

Yet today, thousands of women with silicone breast implants, who could be leading full lives, have become victims and people who might be helped by this miraculous synthetic material have seen the frightening headlines about these implants and may reject silicone options out of hand.

What the headlines never say is that, along with breast implants, silicone is used for everything from the replacement of cheek bones to artificial heart valves. It is used to help people see again and save the lives of children with severe brain disorders. But you’d be unlikely to learn that by watching television “exposes” or reading newspaper stories on the subject.

Rather than a miracle cure, you might think silicone is a dangerous substance that causes illnesses from Lupus to arthritis in thousands of women with breast implants. This is a classic case of anecdotal myth overpowering scientific evidence with tragic results.

Today, thanks to the silicone panic, hundreds of thousands of women who have had these implants now live in constant fear that they, too, will one day suffer from a “silicone-caused” illness.

But the news media aren’t the only ones responsible. The doctors who get huge fees for making highly suspicious diagnoses to support breast implant lawsuits should also get some credit. As Dr. Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, put it, “Not only are these doctors guilty of putting personal gain before their professional commitments, but they also subject women to unnecessary, costly and sometimes risky treatments.”

But, most of all, we can thank greedy lawyers whose never-ending search for a dollar began the silicone panic in the first place. In the early 1990s, the first lawsuits were filed that claimed breast implants caused a wide variety of health problems. When the FDA, under intense political pressure, put a moratorium on the use of breast implants, an avalanche of litigation soon followed.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, called the implant litigation a “trial lawyers’ game” and “an abomination for women.” But for these lawyers, it’s a game worth playing because it takes but few winning cases to rack up big fees. In fact, lawyers who specialize in breast implant cases have made up to $40 million in one year. As a retired scientist, I believe strongly that the campaign against silicone breast implant producers is often based not on sound, scientific proof of illness or damage but on greed and emotion.

In fact, over the past two years, study after study has found no evidence to support the basic premise of these billion-dollar lawsuits - that silicone breast implants cause illness. In 1994, a Mayo Clinic study “found no association between breast implants and the connective tissue diseases and other disorders that were studied.”

A Harvard Medical School study a year later came to the same conclusion. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California found similar results studying other diseases. The list of highly respected medical institutions who have all reached the same conclusions goes on and on, but so do the silicone breast implant lawsuits

I came to this country almost 50 years ago, and I worry that greed and a lack of personal responsibility and accountability are eroding its foundations. America has always been a land of great dreamers and experimenters whose achievements have saved millions of lives and made the world better. Today, however, frivolous but lucrative liability litigation threatens to extinguish the bright light of scientific discovery in this country at a time when so many diseases are still in desperate need of a cure.

Like many whose lives have been restored through science, I believe that if we don’t rein in these lawyers and their “loot-for-liability” lawsuits, we really will have a reason to panic.

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