Confessions of a Medical Heretic – (Part One)

Duty to Warn

Gary G. Kohls, MD

 

 

The readers of my weekly Duty to Warn columns know that I often write about some of the concerns that I have regarding the once honorable medical profession that, for 40 years, I called my own.

Actually, my major concerns haven’t been solely about physicians, but about the for-profit systems that have arisen since I was a medical student. Most of the med school friends that I knew seemed to be serious about their desire to do good in the world. I sincerely believed that most of us took seriously the Hippocratic Oath (“first do no harm”) that we all swore to adhere to when we got our medical degrees.

I was naively grateful to Eli Lilly when that drug company gave us reflex hammers, stethoscopes and a doctor’s bag during our second-year clinical rotations. I still have them and, although the rubbery parts are getting pretty brittle now, the chrome plating is still shiny.

The reputation of Lilly since the 1960s, however, has been increasingly grimy on its ethical inside but somehow still somewhat shiny on the outside – when it comes to corporate profits.

Ever since 1989, there have been thousands of lawsuits (originating in every state of the union) that have been brought against Lilly just from its block buster (so-called “antidepressant” drug Prozac. Prozac received FDA approval for marketing in 1987 and it didn’t take long for surprised and alarmed psychiatrists all over the world to start seeing dramatic increases in suicide attempts and suicidal thinking among the patients that they had naively recommended taking the new, heavily advertised drug.  One set of Prozac class action suits settled for $1.5 billion.