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Bizarre Bedfellows

To an observer not caught up in them, the breast implant debates have a Through the Looking Glass air. Consider the response from a feminist media commentator at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the liberal watchdog group, to Gina Kolata’s reports. For exposing the activities of a gang of doctors and lawyers who exploit women’s suffering, Kolata and her editors at the New York Times might reasonably have expected praise from Laura Flanders, who covers women’s issues for FAIR. Instead Flanders accused Kolata of practicing “junk journalism” by allowing herself to be “spoon-fed ... fake facts” by implant manufacturers. The Mayo Clinic study and others might be biased, Flanders suggested, because they were published in the New England,journal, a publication “cram-packed with advertisements by medical suppliers including Dow Corning,” which also provided partial funding for some of the research on implants.51

I am a fan of much of Flanders’s work—earlier I cited her perceptive analyses of how the media demonize impoverished mothers—but I was dumbfounded by her harangue against Kolata. Does Flanders take prescription drugs when she’s ill? I began to wonder as I read her critique. Presumably she does not—since drug advertisements provide much of the revenue for the medical journals that publish studies about drugs, and drug makers help pay for much of the research done on the safety and effectiveness of medications.52

Personally, these facts don’t particularly trouble me, for the same reason they fail to disturb most doctors and medical researchers. We know that the results of corporate-supported medical research can generally be trusted, particularly when it is conducted at academic research centers and published in eminent scientific journals. The scientific method itself, as well as the peer review process at the journals, have many safeguards built in. Besides, were biased or fraudulent studies to find their way into print, subsequent studies would likely refute them.53

To be sure, corporate sponsors sometimes try to deter scientific research that might hurt their profits. But do they succeed in preventing truth from getting out? In one celebrated recent case a pharmaceutical company blocked publication for seven years of a study it paid for that found its brand-name thyroid drug no better than cheaper, generic versions. Yet the study ultimately did come out in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, accompanied by an apology from the president of the drug company.54

Or consider an episode that anti-implant advocates have publicized to great advantage. While serving as a $300-an-hour consultant to lawyers defending Dow Corning, Peter Schur of Harvard served as an editor of the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism. In his role as gatekeeper he rejected several papers that implicate implants in autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, yet published a paper he himself co-authored that denies any connection between implants and the diseases.

Lawyers for implanted women painted Schur’s actions as a clear instance of the partisan suppression of research findings. When a panel of medical experts subsequently reviewed the rejected papers, however, they ruled that Schur’s decisions had been scientifically sound. Moreover, in light of the controversy, Schur resigned from another Harvard study of breast implants to protect the research from accusations of bias.55

By comparison, advocates for metaphoric illnesses seldom apologize or back off, and they are proven effective at something more menacing than trying to suppress scientific results. Through intimidation they prevent research. Implant researchers are not the only scientists who have been hassled into submission. Just ask physicians Gregory Simon and Edward Wagner of the University of Washington, whose research showed that blood tests used to support liability and disability claims for people with multiple chemical sensitivities might be meaningless. Following publication of Simon’s and Wagner’s study