The toll of truth: What happens when you expose medical wrongdoing?

The toll of truth: What happens when you expose medical wrongdoing?
Whistleblowers are often shunned and discredited, but honoring one's moral code is ultimately worth it

By MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED JUNE 20, 2024 5:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Dan Markingson’s mother was worried about him. Her son, seriously struggling with mental illness, had enrolled in an AstraZeneca drug trial at the University of Minnesota. Over the next few months, his condition appeared to deteriorate, even as his mother Mary Weiss begged to get him out of the trial. “Do we have to wait until he kills himself or anyone else before anyone does anything?” she asked in a voicemail to the study coordinator. Three weeks later, in April of 2003, he cut his throat.

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I spoke to the author recently about the lessons of the past, the toll of telling the truth, and why one whistleblower says that every one of them is just “an amateur playing against professionals.”

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There are there are certain words that keep coming up in this book, and one of them is "loneliness." What often happens when someone points out these ethical violations, the repercussions are immediate and punitive, and the person is isolated.

It played out differently for almost everybody I talked to in the book. It feels like the further away you are from the scene of the crime, the better off you'll be, morally and emotionally and psychologically. For example, Peter Buxtun, there's a sense in which he's an insider, he's working for the Public Health Service. But Tuskegee is happening in Macon County, Alabama, thousands of miles away. He's not part of the fraternity of doctors that he’s speaking out against. He's not really counting on a career in public health. He's just doing this temporarily, working as a contact tracer in San Francisco. He was probably the single most undamaged figure in the home in the whole book.

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We live in an age of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, paranoia, skepticism. This history of exploitation and abuse and harm is real. How do we then reassure someone who is looking at maybe doing a clinical trial now? How do we approach our medical system with the right due diligence as patients?

.....What we need is reform of the system, so that we don't have to worry about this. The problem in academic health centers is that reflexive tendency to say, “Nobody can know about this. We have to keep it quiet. If we have a victim coming forward, or we have a whistleblower coming forward, we have to discredit them, so that no one will actually believe what they're saying. If we can't discredit it, then we need to sweep it under the rug. We need to keep it as quiet as possible. We need to settle it, and we need to settle it with a confidentiality agreement so that nobody knows about this. And then, if they do know about it, never apologize. Never compensate the victims. Never admit wrongdoing.” ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/06/20/the-toll-of-truth-what-happens-when-you-expose-wrongdoing/