Dispensing With the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle over Fen-Phen

Rating:
Summary: Must read!
Review: Alicia Mundy weaves a horrific tale of AHP and the FDA that every person should seriously consider. This information is not only applicable to Fen-Phen users, but users of other drugs on the market that are currently under investigation.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Eye Opening
Review: I read this book based on suggestion from someone else. I would not have picked it up on my own. But I'm glad I did. It opened my eyes to the "business" of drugs and the profit surrounding it. It shattered my naive belief that a company producing drugs and an organization created to protect my safety would always do the right thing. It also was a good teaching element for how government, business, and the legal arm work in the pharmaceutical industry. At the end I felt for the average person who innocently takes a prescribed product. This book has made me forever wary.

Rating:
Summary: This book will make your blood boil!
Review: On a recommendation from the website for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, I purchased this book and was riveted from beginning to end. As a woman who takes medicine for depression, and has a sister who took Redux for two months, I found this book a true shocker and a well-told tale. Alicia Mundy arranges a vast amount of material and lays out a stark and gripping tale of how the FDA - many of whose members are on the drug companies' payrolls - approved Redux despite its proven history of making women (literally) deathly ill. I felt tremendous solidarity with the lawyers prosecuting the case, among them Alex MacDonald, who worked in tandem with his wife, Dr. Maureen MacDonald (a doctor specializing in anesthesia). Because it is a true story, Mundy's book does two things: one, it makes the readers (including myself) far more wary of the FDA and the drugs our doctors prescribe, and two, its story takes twists and turns no fiction book could plausibly get away with. If you take prescription medicine of any kind for any reason, read this book, and remember Mary Linnen the next time you think about buying weight-loss drugs.

Rating:
Summary: Saucy and outrageous will leave you outraged
Review: Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this book was the way it made me smile and laugh, in the midst of a story that is frightening and sad. Alicia Mundy is saucy, witty, and an incredible story teller. Reading "Dispensing with the Truth" will cause you to become furious with the drug companies, inspired by the heroic lawyers, and intrigued by the inner workings of the FDA. I felt great disappointment with the drug industry, but at the same time I was hopeful, as the author finds many rays of light. For example, one of the heroes in the book was a med tech in Fargo, North Dakota named Pam Ruff, who pursued a strange coincidence in the echocardiograms of her patients not because she thought she could profit, but because she thought she could help. And then there is the FDA's Leo Lutwak, who risked his reputation and his job to voice his dissent over the approval of the dangerous drugs. I strongly recommend this book if you are looking for a gift for a mother, a sister, a lawyer, or anyone who likes courtroom thrillers.

Rating:
Summary: No matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides
Review: Tens of thousands of claimants have hit the jackpot with Phen-fen. Fraudulant claims are rampant and people like this claim moral high ground. Disgusting. Without tort reform, the drug industry will go down in flames. Who in their right mind would develop a drug for the severely obese now, as a group they are a high risk group anyway, possibly higher risk than any other, unhealthy and prone to disease...and their numbers are growing daily. Our legal system has brought access to new medicines to treat obesity to a new low, and subjected us all to their amoral "justice" at the expense of American jobs to boot. That is the real story!

Rating:
Summary: No matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides
Review: The book discusses several cases of Fen-Phen, the diet drug. The book goes through the history of the drug, the drug companies efforts to conceal the negative side-effects of the drugs. It continues on through the FDA approval process, how the drug companies paid for numerous studies to prove the drugs were safe and wrote articles and paid doctors to publish the articles in the doctor's names. On come the lawyers to protect the injured victims and the ones for the drug companies. The book even covers the power struggles between plaintiffs attorneys fighting among themselves.

As an attorney, I am inspired to grow my career into Plaintiff's drug litigation because the problems plaguing Fen-Phen will likely repeat.

Rating:
Summary: A Riveting Page-Turner
Review: This book will make you furious, and it will make you think twice (or three or four times) about the drugs you take, especially ones that have only recently been approved by the FDA. Alicia Mundy tells the story very well and has you on the edge of your seat much of the time. I'm not usually much of a one for stories of victims, lawyers, drug companies, and the FDA, but I couldn't put the book down. It reads like a thriller, and the information it contains is especially vital to anyone who has ever taken Fen-Phen. Even if you would never consider taking a diet drug, you need to learn how ineffectual the FDA has become in the face of the super-powerful drug companies. The drug companies involved knew about the serious health risks associated with these drugs and made every effort not to inform doctors and drug users about the potential dangers. Worse yet, they knew that the drug didn't work. And although they were recommending it for long-term use, they had tested it only for short-term use. This book will make you angry, and given that nearly five times as many people have died from the Fen-Phen debacle as from faulty Firestone tires, we should be angry--angry enough to get Congress to put some teeth back in the FDA so that this sort of tragedy never happens again.

Rating:
Summary: an important story, but a disappointing book
Review: This is a good read, especially in the beginning, but if you want to go beyond the courtroom drama and the legal aspects of the case, you have to read carefully. (Taking notes wouldn't hurt.) This is a complex story, and one has to admire Alicia Mundy's skill in managing it while spinning out an engaging narrative. She succeeds by concentrating on one case, that of 29-year-old Mary Linnen, an Orchard Park, New York woman, who developed primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) after using the Fen-Phen drug combination for a mere 23 days. There is no cure for PPH, and the treatments amount to something like sustained torture. Tragically, less than a year after diagnosis, Mary Linnen was dead.

Within her story, Mundy focuses on two main characters. One is the engaging and colorful Alex MacDonald, the lead attorney representing Mary Linnen's estate, who along with many others sued American Home Products, the parent company of Wyeth-Ayerst, the distributors of Pondimin and Redux (one half of the deadly Fen-Phen diet cocktail), for wrongful death; and the other is Leo Lutwak, a well-meaning but ineffectual administrator at the Food and Drug Administration. But I think the real story here is the corporate mentality inside the drug companies that led to the tragedy, and the incompetence at the FDA that allowed it. Although I think Mundy concentrates too much on the lawyers in her narrative (she indicates in the "Acknowledgments" that she was inspired by Jonathan Harr's lawyer-centered A Civil Action), she is still able to give a complete story, but it takes some real effort on the part of the reader to get it all. I had to take notes and flip back through the pages with the aid of the Index to keep Pondimin and its "sister" drug Redux separate from Phentermine, and to realize that it is the combination of Pondimin and Phentermine or the combination of Redux and Phentermine that is the deadly Fen-Phen combo. When one looks deeper it becomes apparent that Pondimin is the brand name for the drug fenfluramine and Redux for dexfenfluramine, the "Fen" in "Fen-Phen."

It's an important part of the story to realize that doctors prescribed Phentermine in combination with Pondimin because Pondimin alone led to unwanted drowsiness while Phentermine "was," as Mundy phrases it on page 39, "after all, a form of <speed>." The logic here, although not mentioned, is similar to that of the hugely successful Sudafed combination of the antihistamine Chlorpheniramine Maleate, which leads to drowsiness, and the nasal decongestant Pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride, which counteracts that effect by speeding up your system.

Still, it's not clear why so people so eagerly gobbled up the Fen-Phen combo. Mundy indicates that part of the reason was a massive advertising and PR campaign spun out by the drug companies--she calls it "Obesity, Inc."--a campaign that made the never-proven claim that over 300,000 Americans, mostly women, die each year from the "disease" of obesity. The drug companies positioned themselves as wanting to save those lives. However, Mundy cites a study on page 155 showing that the long-term expected weight loss from using Fen-Phen was only about three percent above that of a placebo.

To me the most unsettling part of this story is the stupidity practiced by the FDA and by Wyeth in not realizing that Pondimin or Redux in combination with Phentermine was in its effects very similar to Aminorex, an appetite suppressant that caused a major epidemic of primary pulmonary hypertension, killing hundreds of people in Europe during the mid-1960s. (p. 38) Mundy quotes John Restaino, "a young doctor turned lawyer," as saying (p. 198), himself quoting an unidentified Swedish scientist, "When I saw the combination of Pondimin and Phentermine, Fen-Phen, I said, <My God, they've re-created Aminorex!>." (Incidentally, the lack of attribution for some of the text--there are no footnotes--is a disappointment.)

This bit of ignorance, perhaps willful, by Wyeth and the FDA was followed by a frenzy of greed when the drug companies realized the potential profits. This in turn was followed by attempts at obfuscation and cover-up, denial and feigned ignorance, when the deadly side effects became public knowledge. Ironically, it wasn't PPH that finally led to the withdrawal of the drugs, but another, also deadly side effect, that of heart valvular disease, uncovered by two Fargo, North Dakota residents, med tech Pam Ruff and cardiologist Jack Crary. To my mind, their story is the most important part of the book. Their unselfish and courageous work led to the withdrawal of the drugs and saved the lives of untold numbers of people.

Bottom line: this is an engaging read about a preventable tragedy and the triumph of litigation against a big corporation to be ranked with A Civil Action (the book, not the so-so movie) and the Erin Brockovich story.

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading For Anyone Who Takes Prescription Medicine
Review: This superb publication serves as an important guide for anyone who wants to know how drug companies operate and how trial lawyers help to uncover corporate dirt.

Preying on consumers and health care providers ,drug companies hype the benefits of their drugs, while hiding the dirt about the known dangers of their pills .

While Fen-Phen is now off the market, the manner in which the pharmaceutical companies operate in marketing and selling other drugs remains business as usual !