The Most Shocking Medical Treatments Doctors Swore Were Safe

[00:00:01]thalidomide The drug is called a miracle.

[00:00:06]That is the actual word used in the marketing materials.

[00:00:10]A miracle.

[00:00:12]In the late 1950s, a West German pharmaceutical company called Chemie Grünenthal introduces a new sedative to the market. It eases morning sickness.

[00:00:21]It helps pregnant women sleep through the worst of the first trimester.

[00:00:25]Doctors across Europe, Australia, the UK, and Canada hand it out freely because the safety data says it is safe.

[00:00:34]The safety data they generated by testing it on adults.

[00:00:39]I mean, nobody tests it on pregnant women.

[00:00:42]Nobody tests what it does to the tissue forming inside them.

[00:00:46]Frances Kelsey is a pharmacologist newly arrived at the FDA when she receives the American approval application in September 1960.

[00:00:54]Something in the data bothers her.

[00:00:57]She cannot prove the drug is dangerous, but she keeps asking for more evidence before she will sign off.

[00:01:03]The pharmaceutical company calls her obstructionist.

[00:01:06]They go above her head.

[00:01:08]She holds her ground.

[00:01:11]Europe is not so fortunate. By 1961, the reports begin arriving. Babies born without arms, without legs, with small flipper-like limbs where hands and feet should be, a condition called phocomelia, so rare that most physicians have never encountered a single case in their careers.

[00:01:31]Now they are seeing dozens, then hundreds.

[00:01:36]Frances Kelsey's obstruction has kept the drug out of American pharmacies.

[00:01:41]In the rest of the world, more than 10,000 children are born with severe deformities.

[00:01:47]6,000 survive infancy.

[00:01:49]The drug is pulled from shelves in November 1961.

[00:01:53]It has been on the market for less than 4 years.

[00:01:57]The company is aware something is wrong by August. They wait 3 months.

[00:02:02]Frances Kelsey receives the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962.

[00:02:09]The executives of Chemie Grünenthal are never convicted.

[00:02:14]The Tricho System. The appointment is Tuesday morning. The technician, not a doctor, just a technician, adjusts a dial and asks the woman to hold still.

[00:02:25]It is 1924 and she is here to have her facial hair removed the modern way.

[00:02:32]In the early 20th century, X-rays are new, thrilling, and deeply misunderstood.

[00:02:38]Which is another way of saying nobody with a commercial interest particularly wants to understand them yet.

[00:02:43]What is understood is that radiation destroys hair follicles.

[00:02:47]The beauty industry moves fast.

[00:02:50]Yeah, of course it does.

[00:02:52]Clinics and salons across America and Europe begin offering X-ray hair removal, the Tricho System, marketed as painless, permanent, and safe.

[00:03:02]Women pay for it.

[00:03:04]Their mothers pay for it.

[00:03:05]Occasionally, they bring their daughters.

[00:03:08]The treatments work at first. The hair disappears. The skin looks smooth.

[00:03:14]Clients return for more sessions and more after that because the hair keeps growing back and they are told that a few more treatments will fix it permanently.

[00:03:23]Each time the technician turns the dial a little higher than before.

[00:03:28]Then the skin starts to change.

[00:03:30]Ulcers open where the beam was aimed.

[00:03:33]The jaw swells.

[00:03:35]Bone begins dying beneath the surface, a condition called radiation osteonecrosis, where the jawbone quietly rots from the inside out.

[00:03:45]Skin cancers develop years later, clustered in patterns that correspond exactly to where the machine was pointed.

[00:03:52]Some women lose portions of their faces.

[00:03:55]Some develop tumors that move into the throat.

[00:03:59]The man behind the Tricho system is Albert Geyser, who holds a medical degree.

[00:04:05]He understands what ionizing radiation does to living tissue.

[00:04:09]He markets the device for over a decade anyway.

[00:04:12]No criminal charges are ever filed.

[00:04:15]The clinics close quietly.

[00:04:17]The women left behind, scarred, disfigured, dying of cancers that will not be formally documented for another generation, have no word for what was done to them.

[00:04:30]D E S The prescription is for the mother.

[00:04:34]The damage is for the daughter.

[00:04:37]Diethylstilbestrol, D E S, is a synthetic estrogen developed in 1938 and prescribed to pregnant women throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s to prevent miscarriage.

[00:04:49]It is, doctors are told, safe and effective.

[00:04:53]The evidence behind that claim is thin.

[00:04:55]D E S is never formally tested in pregnant women before approval.

[00:05:00]The assumption, unstated and unexamined, is that if it is safe in an adult body, it is safe in the womb.

[00:05:07]Between 2 and 10 million American women take it during pregnancy.

[00:05:11]Some are given it without a clear explanation of what it is.

[00:05:15]Just a pill to protect the baby. That's it. That's the full explanation they receive. Huh?

[00:05:21]What it does is cross the placenta. It reaches the developing child, and in daughters, it quietly rewires the architecture of the reproductive system while it is still forming.

[00:05:32]The first signal comes in 1971.

[00:05:35]A Boston physician named Arthur Herbst notices a cluster of clear cell adenocarcinoma, a rare vaginal cancer, in women between the ages of 15 and 20 two.

[00:05:47]This cancer essentially does not occur in women this young.

[00:05:50]He traces every case back.

[00:05:53]Each patient's mother took DES during pregnancy.

[00:05:57]The FDA issues a warning. The drug is banned for use in pregnancy.

[00:06:03]But the prescriptions span nearly 30 years, and the daughters who carry the consequences are scattered across the country. DES daughters grow up to find their cervixes are malformed, their uteruses misshapen.

[00:06:17]Their miscarriage rates run two to three times higher than average.

[00:06:21]Their cancer risk is elevated for life.

[00:06:25]DES sons, male children exposed in the womb, develop genital abnormalities and higher rates of testicular cancer.

[00:06:33]>> [screaming] >> Researchers are now documenting effects in the grandchildren.

[00:06:37]Three generations from one prescription.

[00:06:41]I mean, the mother took the pill her doctor gave her. She didn't tell her daughter because she didn't know there was anything to tell.

[00:06:49]The daughter found out from a pathology report at 20 years old.

[00:06:55]Walter Freeman.

[00:06:57]Walter Freeman does not need an operating theater. He does not need a surgical team or a general anesthesia.

[00:07:04]All he needs is an ice pick and about 10 minutes.

[00:07:08]Freeman is a neurologist, not a surgeon, who becomes America's most prolific advocate for the lobotomy in the 1940s and 50s.

[00:07:17]The original procedure requires drilling through the skull.

[00:07:21]Freeman finds this unnecessarily involved. He modifies the technique.

[00:07:26]A surgical ice pick inserted above the eyeball through the thin bone of the eye socket, angled upward and moved back and forth to sever the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.

[00:07:39]He uses an electroconvulsive shock to render the patient briefly unconscious instead of anesthesia.

[00:07:46]He calls it the transorbital lobotomy.

[00:07:50]He takes it on the road.

[00:07:52]Nearly literal.

[00:07:53]Freeman travels the United States in a vehicle he calls the lobotomobile, performing procedures at state psychiatric hospitals, sometimes completing multiple patients in a single afternoon.

[00:08:06]He keeps his ice picks in a felt-lined case.

[00:08:09]He times himself.

[00:08:11]His personal record is 228 lobotomies in 12 days.

[00:08:17]While one hand holds the pick in place, the other takes photographs.

[00:08:22]The patients who come to him include people with schizophrenia, severe depression, chronic anxiety, and in a number of cases, simply being difficult to manage in an institution.

[00:08:34]They emerge calmer.

[00:08:36]They emerge compliant.

[00:08:39]In a significant number of cases, they emerge as something that no longer resembles the person who walked in.

[00:08:45]An estimated 40,000 Americans are lobotomized between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s.

[00:08:52]Freeman personally performs around 3 and 1/2 thousand.

[00:08:57]His most famous patient is Rosemary Kennedy, 23 years old, mildly intellectually disabled.

[00:09:04]After Freeman is finished, she cannot walk properly or speak clearly.

[00:09:10]She lives in an institution for 64 years.

[00:09:14]The procedure earns its creator, Antonio Egas Moniz, the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949.

[00:09:22]Freeman loses his surgical privileges in 1967 when a patient dies on the table.

[00:09:28]He spends the remaining years of his life driving the lobotomobile to visit former patients, taking notes on their condition, calling it follow-up.

[00:09:40]Vioxx Merck launches Vioxx in 1999 with a straightforward pitch.

[00:09:46]It is a painkiller that is easier on the stomach than aspirin or ibuprofen.

[00:09:51]That part is true.

[00:09:53]What Merck does not include in the pitch is what the drug does to the heart.

[00:09:58]Vioxx is a COX-2 inhibitor prescribed primarily for arthritis.

[00:10:04]Within a few years, it becomes one of the best-selling drugs in pharmaceutical history.

[00:10:08]80 million patients across more than 80 countries.

[00:10:13]And by 2000, Merck's own researchers have clinical trial data showing that patients on Vioxx suffer significantly higher rates of heart attacks and strokes than patients on naproxen.

[00:10:24]There is an internal memo.

[00:10:26]There are internal discussions.

[00:10:28]And there is a strategy.

[00:10:32]That strategy, documented in company emails, involves training sales representatives to deflect cardiovascular questions using a prepared script.

[00:10:41]>> [clears throat] >> The document is called Dodgeball Vioxx.

[00:10:46]Merck also runs a program called Advantage, presented as a clinical trial but functioning primarily as a tool for getting physicians familiar with the drug and prescribing it to new patients.

[00:10:57]The trial is designed for market penetration. Safety is not the priority.

[00:11:03]An FDA scientist named David Graham conducts an independent analysis in 2004.

[00:11:09]His estimate?

[00:11:10]Vioxx causes between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks in the United States during its time on the market.

[00:11:19]Between 27,000 and 55,000 of those patients die.

[00:11:24]Merck voluntarily withdraws Vioxx in September 2004.

[00:11:29]Not under regulatory order.

[00:11:32]A new clinical trial has made the cardiac data impossible to manage publicly any longer.

[00:11:38]They pull it themselves before the FDA can act and frame it as a responsible corporate decision.

[00:11:45]In 2007, Merck agrees to pay $4.85 billion to settle approximately 27,000 personal injury claims.

[00:11:54]No individual executive is charged with a crime.

[00:11:58]A separate $950 million settlement follows in 2011, including an admission of illegal marketing.

[00:12:06]The company continues operating.

[00:12:10]David Graham, the scientist who ran those numbers, is investigated by his own employer, the FDA, for going public.

[00:12:20]Purdue Pharma In 1996, Purdue Pharma launches OxyContin with a sales strategy built on one central claim. This opioid is different. It releases slowly. It is less addictive.

[00:12:34]Doctors can prescribe it freely.

[00:12:37]That claim is not supported by evidence.

[00:12:39]Purdue's own data suggests otherwise.

[00:12:42]The sales representatives are trained to say it anyway.

[00:12:45]OxyContin is reformulated as a 12-hour slow-release pill.

[00:12:50]The slow-release mechanism is supposed to reduce the euphoric surge that drives addiction.

[00:12:55]In practice, the effects wear off in 6 to 8 hours for many patients, leaving them in pain and early withdrawal twice a day.

[00:13:03]The solution offered to their doctors is a higher dose.

[00:13:07]Purdue builds a sales force of over 900 representatives by 2001, paid on commission tied directly to prescription volume in their territories.

[00:13:17]They target high-prescribing physicians.

[00:13:19]They bring them to resort conferences.

[00:13:22]They hand out patient starter coupons.

[00:13:24]The first prescription is free.

[00:13:27]Internal documents released through litigation show show that Purdue executives identify suspected pill mills, clinics where OxyContin is clearly being diverted for non-medical use.

[00:13:38]They make a deliberate decision not to report these clinics to authorities because those clinics are also among their highest volume customers.

[00:13:47]Between 1999 and 2021, approximately 600,000 Americans die of opioid overdose. Around 80% of heroin users report their addiction began with a prescription painkiller.

[00:14:00]In 2022, members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $6 billion in a civil settlement. They face no criminal prosecution. They are permitted to retain billions in personal wealth transferred out of the company before the litigation began.

[00:14:16]Several major museums have since removed the Sackler name from their walls.

[00:14:21]Several have not.

[00:14:33]>> [music]