Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17211

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: Journal Article

Dyer C
Doctor could face financial ruin even if he wins libel case
BMJ 2010 Feb 16;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/feb16_2/c967

Abstract:

An attempt to settle a libel battle between the British cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst and the US medical device manufacturer NMT Medical by mediation has failed, and the case now seems headed for a trial that could prove financially ruinous for him even if he wins.

NMT is opposing an application by Dr Wilmshurst’s solicitor, Mark Lewis, for the company to pay into court enough money to guarantee that his legal costs will be reimbursed if he successfully defends its libel action against him.

The company, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, is suing him over remarks he made to a US website alleging flaws in a clinical trial of its STARFlex septal repair implant (BMJ 2008;337:a2412; doi:10.1136/bmj.a2412). He was joint principal investigator of the trial.

So far he has incurred costs of around £200 000 (230 000; $313 000) fighting the claim, of which he has . . .

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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