Remembering Thalidomide

Back in the early '60s, thalidomide was marketed, prescribed and sold in Europe to pregnant women as a means to alleviate morning sickness. 

Although it was not approved in the United States, the Richardson-Merrell pharmaceutical company repeatedly applied to the FDA for approval. These applications were denied because of insufficient clinical testing.

So, the pharmaceutical company enlisted local, family physicians to give out the drug to their patients without telling them. Basically, doctors were paid to experiment on their patients. At the time, apparently, this was considered a perfectly fine thing to do - until an abnormal number of children were born with horrific defects. 

It actually took an act of Congress to keep doctors from running experiments on their unsuspecting patients! 

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the FDA is credited with saving countless lives by refusing to approve the application, and the story is supposed to have a happy ending.

But here's the thing. Doctors were beginning to report evidence of problems with thalidomide and pregnant women as early as 1956. Richardson-Merrell made their application to the FDA in 1960! They didn't withdraw the application until 1962. 

Everyone agrees that the numbers of children affected by thalidomide throughout the world numbered well into the thousands. The numbers get a little more obscure when you look at the United States. The AMA says the number is down around 17. Other estimates put it at around 100. 

I don't know, but it seems to me that I can remember at least one kid my age with hands at his elbows, and I feel that there may have been more that I had seen. Enough so that it wasn't shocking or terribly unusual. To me, that suggests that the number was probably significantly higher than 100 nationwide.

Here's a link to an AMA article that appeared in their Journal of Ethics in July 2001.

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2001/07/prol1-0107.html

One of the underlying themes of Night Song is that if you trust in authority and believe that they have your best interests at heart, you not only put yourself at the mercy of their personal agendas, but you will likely also have a heavy price to pay for their ignorance. And the louder they proclaim their authority, the greater the depth that their personal agenda and ignorance is likely to be.

I'm doing it right now.