The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [94]
The ban on implants and the scares about them may have created a greater cancer risk than the implants themselves, some doctors told Brecher, because some women who would have come forward for early diagnosis and treatment delayed doing so—because they feared, wrongly, that there would be no possibility of reconstruction. Marcia Angell goes even further: the implant scare harmed Americans seeking treatment for a variety of illnesses, she contends. Manufacturers of silicone-containing devices such as artificial joints, heart valves, and jaw implants, and companies such as Dow and DuPont that supply raw materials for such devices, scaled back production or got out of the business entirely rather than fight lawsuits.42
Cashing In
While some industries were cashing out of the implant business, others were cashing in—most notably, TV talk shows and law firms.
Never in the wretched history of talk TV was there a juicier story, from the ratings-ravenous perspective of producers, than that of Laura Thorpe, the woman who took a razor and cut out her own breast implants. After an article about her appeared in a newspaper in 1992 producers of talk shows scrambled to book the unemployed woman on their programs. So eager were staffers at the “Sally Jesse Raphael” show when they discovered that Thorpe had no telephone, they rushed to the trailer park in New Mexico where she lived and flew her, her husband, and three of her five children to New York. Producers of “Maury Povich,” not to be outdone, smoked out where Thorpe was staying and convinced her to appear on their show. They whisked her away to a studio and taped a program before Sally’s people even knew she had been nabbed.
“The audience is breathless, and so am I. I mean, we just want to clutch ourselves,” Povich gushed as he introduced Thorpe, a woman he portrayed as burdened with awful ailments caused by her implants but unable to afford surgery to have the implants removed. Her extreme action seemed almost rational in light of the maladies caused by the implants, including gangrene in her fingers and autoimmune diseases. “If you’re going to die if you don’t do something, you’ve got to do something,” Thorpe exclaimed.43
Neither Thorpe nor Povich offered proof that those physical ailments actually existed, of course, or that implants had caused them. Nor did they entertain the possibility that Thorpe was suffering from a psychotic break or severe depression, as psychologists Jeanne Heaton and Nona Wilson later concluded after they researched Thorpe for their book, Tuning in Trouble: Talk TV’s Destructive Impact on Mental Health. It took all of Povich’s interviewing skills, Heaton and Wilson show, to keep Thorpe from sounding deranged during the broadcast. In answer to questions about the implants, she rambled on about having grown up in orphanages and foster homes, her unemployed husband, and feeling sorry for men because they have to shave. Povich managed to redirect Thorpe back to the matter of the implants before she wandered too far afield, and his producers kept the TV audience focused by flashing across the screen, “BREAST IMPLANT HORROR,” the program’s title.44
The horrors of implants became commonplace topics throughout talk television during the early and mid-1990s. Ultimately, though, it was not people with names we recognize, such as Povich and Winfrey, who most benefited from translating women’s aches and pains into implant illnesses. That distinction belongs to attorneys whose names are not household words, but who persuaded juries to award women anywhere from a couple of thousand to $25 million each for illnesses purportedly caused by their implants. The lawyers took as much as 40 percent of these awards.45
If the FDA ban on implants had been a grand victory of anecdote over