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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10747

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Family Drops Accutane Lawsuit
Associated Press 2007 Jun 27
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118296697582550386.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


Full text:

TAMPA, Fla. — Relatives of a 15-year-old boy who crashed a stolen plane into a skyscraper in 2002 have dropped their lawsuit that blamed an acne drug for his suicide, saying they were physically and emotionally unable to pursue the claim.

U.S. District Judge James Moody dismissed the lawsuit Tuesday at the request of lawyers for Julia Bishop and Karen Johnson, the mother and grandmother of Charles Bishop.

The boy’s death gained international attention as images were broadcast of the stolen Cessna protruding from the Bank of America Plaza downtown, four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Inside the plane, Mr. Bishop left a note sympathetic to Osama bin Laden.

Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., the maker of Accutane, contended Mr. Bishop was a troubled young man and his use of Accutane was not to blame for his suicide. Court papers filed by the company say the boy’s parents tried to carry out a suicide pact before he was born, and his mother had numerous bouts of depression.

Hoffman-La Roche contends Accutane is safe, but recommends users be screened for depression. The Food and Drug Administration said it has 234 reports of suicide among Accutane users world-wide from 1982 to December 2003.

Hoffman-La Roche Inc., based in Nutley, N.J., is the U.S. prescription drug unit of the Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909