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From thalidomide and DES to lobotomies, Vioxx, and OxyContin, this medical history documentary examines treatments doctors and drug companies presented as safe—and the devastating consequences patients faced. The stories reveal how weak evidence, ignored warning signs, and profit-driven decisions harmed children, women, psychiatric patients, and families, while asking who was held accountable.
Explore the history of medical scandals, dangerous drugs, unethical medical practices, pharmaceutical marketing, and patient safety in this narrated documentary. A sobering watch for anyone interested in healthcare history, medical ethics, drug safety, and the real human cost of treatments once widely trusted.
Explore the history of medical scandals, dangerous drugs, unethical medical practices, pharmaceutical marketing, and patient safety in this narrated documentary. A sobering watch for anyone interested in healthcare history, medical ethics, drug safety, and the real human cost of treatments once widely trusted.
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LearningTranscript
00:02Phalidomide. The drug is called a miracle. That is the actual word used in the marketing materials. A miracle.
00:12In the late 1950s, a West German pharmaceutical company called Chemie Grunenthal introduces a new sedative to the market.
00:19It eases morning sickness. It helps pregnant women sleep through the worst of the first trimester.
00:24Doctors across Europe, Australia, the UK and Canada hand it out freely because the safety data says it is safe.
00:33The safety data they generated by testing it on adults.
00:38I mean, nobody tests it on pregnant women. Nobody tests what it does to the tissue forming inside them.
00:45Frances Kelsey is a pharmacologist newly arrived at the FDA when she receives the American approval application in September 1960.
00:54Something in the data bothers her. She cannot prove the drug is dangerous, but she keeps asking for more evidence
01:01before she will sign off.
01:03The pharmaceutical company calls her obstructionist. They go above her head. She holds her ground.
01:10Europe is not so fortunate. By 1961, the reports begin arriving.
01:16Babies born without arms. Without legs. With small, flipper-like limbs where hands and feet should be.
01:23A condition called phocomelia. So rare that most physicians have never encountered a single case in their careers.
01:31Now they are seeing dozens. Then hundreds.
01:36Francis Kelsey's obstruction has kept the drug out of American pharmacies.
01:40In the rest of the world, more than 10,000 children are born with severe deformities.
01:466,000 survive infancy.
01:49The drug is pulled from shelves in November 1961.
01:53It has been on the market for less than four years.
01:56The company is aware something is wrong by August. They wait three months.
02:02Francis Kelsey receives the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962.
02:09The executives of Chemie Grunenthal are never convicted.
02:14The Trico system. The appointment is Tuesday morning.
02:18The technician, not a doctor, just a technician, adjusts a dial and asks the woman to hold still.
02:24It is 1924, and she is here to have her facial hair removed. The modern way.
02:32In the early 20th century, x-rays are new, thrilling, and deeply misunderstood.
02:37Which is another way of saying nobody with a commercial interest particularly wants to understand them yet.
02:43What is understood is that radiation destroys hair follicles.
02:47The beauty industry moves fast.
02:50Yeah, of course it does.
02:52Clinics and salons across America and Europe begin offering x-ray hair removal.
02:57The Trico system.
02:58Marketed as painless, permanent, and safe.
03:02Women pay for it. Their mothers pay for it.
03:06Occasionally, they bring their daughters.
03:08The treatments work at first.
03:10The hair disappears.
03:12The skin looks smooth.
03:14Clients return for more sessions, and more after that,
03:17because the hair keeps growing back,
03:19and they are told that a few more treatments will fix it permanently.
03:23Each time, the technician turns the dial a little higher than before.
03:27Then the skin starts to change.
03:29Ulcers open where the beam was aimed.
03:33The jaw swells.
03:35Bone begins dying beneath the surface.
03:38A condition called radiation osteonecrosis,
03:41where the jawbone quietly rots from the inside out.
03:45Skin cancers develop years later,
03:48clustered in patterns that correspond exactly to where the machine was pointed.
03:52Some women lose portions of their faces.
03:54Some develop tumors that move into the throat.
03:59The man behind the Trico system is Albert Geiser,
04:02who holds a medical degree.
04:04He understands what ionizing radiation does to living tissue.
04:08He markets the device for over a decade anyway.
04:12No criminal charges are ever filed.
04:14The clinics close quietly.
04:16The women left behind, scarred, disfigured,
04:21dying of cancers that will not be formally documented for another generation,
04:25have no word for what was done to them.
04:29D-E-S
04:31The prescription is for the mother.
04:34The damage is for the daughter.
04:37Diethylstilbestrol, D-E-S, is a synthetic estrogen developed in 1938
04:43and prescribed to pregnant women throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s to prevent miscarriage.
04:49It is, doctors are told, safe and effective.
04:52The evidence behind that claim is thin.
04:55D-E-S is never formally tested in pregnant women before approval.
04:59The assumption, unstated and unexamined,
05:02is that if it is safe in an adult body, it is safe in the womb.
05:07Between 2 and 10 million American women take it during pregnancy.
05:11Some are given it without a clear explanation of what it is.
05:14Just a pill to protect the baby.
05:16That's it.
05:17That's the full explanation they receive.
05:20What it does is cross the placenta.
05:23It reaches the developing child.
05:25And in daughters, it quietly rewires the architecture of the reproductive system while it is still forming.
05:32The first signal comes in 1971.
05:35A Boston physician named Arthur Herbst notices a cluster of clear-cell adenocarcinoma,
05:41a rare vaginal cancer, in women between the ages of 15 and 22.
05:46This cancer essentially does not occur in women this young.
05:50He traces every case back.
05:52Each patient's mother took D-E-S during pregnancy.
05:57The FDA issues a warning.
05:59The drug is banned for use in pregnancy.
06:03But the prescriptions span nearly 30 years,
06:06and the daughters who carry the consequences are scattered across the country.
06:10D-E-S daughters grow up to find their cervixes are malformed,
06:14their uteruses misshapen.
06:16Their miscarriage rates run two to three times higher than average.
06:20Their cancer risk is elevated for life.
06:25D-E-S sons, male children exposed in the womb,
06:29develop genital abnormalities and higher rates of testicular cancer.
06:33Researchers are now documenting effects in the grandchildren,
06:37three generations from one prescription.
06:41I mean, the mother took the pill her doctor gave her.
06:44She didn't tell her daughter, because she didn't know there was anything to tell.
06:49The daughter found out from a pathology report at 20 years old.
06:55Walter Freeman
06:56Walter Freeman does not need an operating theater.
07:00He does not need a surgical team or a general anesthesia.
07:04All he needs is an ice pick and about 10 minutes.
07:08Freeman is a neurologist, not a surgeon,
07:11who becomes America's most prolific advocate for the lobotomy in the 1940s and 50s.
07:17The original procedure requires drilling through the skull.
07:20Freeman finds this unnecessarily involved.
07:24He modifies the technique.
07:26A surgical ice pick inserted above the eyeball,
07:29through the thin bone of the eye socket,
07:32angled upward and moved back and forth
07:34to sever the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
07:38He uses an electroconvulsive shock to render the patient briefly unconscious instead of anesthesia.
07:46He calls it the transorbital lobotomy.
07:49He takes it on the road.
07:51Nearly literal.
07:53Freeman travels the United States in a vehicle he calls the lobotomobile,
07:58performing procedures at state psychiatric hospitals,
08:01sometimes completing multiple patients in a single afternoon.
08:05He keeps his ice picks in a felt-lined case.
08:09He times himself.
08:11His personal record is 228 lobotomies in 12 days.
08:16While one hand holds the pick in place, the other takes photographs.
08:22The patients who come to him include people with schizophrenia,
08:26severe depression, chronic anxiety,
08:28and, in a number of cases, simply being difficult to manage in an institution.
08:33They emerge calmer.
08:36They emerge compliant.
08:38In a significant number of cases,
08:40they emerge as something that no longer resembles the person who walked in.
08:45An estimated 40,000 Americans are lobotomized between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s.
08:52Freeman personally performs around 3,500.
08:56His most famous patient is Rosemary Kennedy, 23 years old, mildly intellectually disabled.
09:04After Freeman is finished, she cannot walk properly or speak clearly.
09:09She lives in an institution for 64 years.
09:13The procedure earns its creator, Antonio Igas Moniz, the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949.
09:21Freeman loses his surgical privileges in 1967 when a patient dies on the table.
09:27He spends the remaining years of his life driving the lobotomobile to visit former patients,
09:33taking notes on their condition, calling it follow-up.
09:40Vioxx
09:41Merck launches Vioxx in 1999 with a straightforward pitch.
09:45It is a painkiller that is easier on the stomach than aspirin or ibuprofen.
09:51That part is true.
09:52What Merck does not include in the pitch is what the drug does to the heart.
09:58Vioxx is a COX2 inhibitor, prescribed primarily for arthritis.
10:03Within a few years, it becomes one of the best-selling drugs in pharmaceutical history.
10:0880 million patients across more than 80 countries.
10:12And by 2000, Merck's own researchers have clinical trial data showing that patients on Vioxx
10:18suffer significantly higher rates of heart attacks and strokes than patients on naproxen.
10:24There is an internal memo.
10:26There are internal discussions.
10:28And there is a strategy.
10:31That strategy, documented in company emails, involves training sales representatives
10:36to deflect cardiovascular questions using a prepared script.
10:41The document is called Dodgeball Vioxx.
10:45Merck also runs a program called Advantage, presented as a clinical trial, but functioning primarily
10:51as a tool for getting physicians familiar with the drug and prescribing it to new patients.
10:56The trial is designed for market penetration.
11:00Safety is not the priority.
11:02An FDA scientist named David Graham conducts an independent analysis in 2004.
11:08His estimate?
11:10Vioxx causes between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks in the United States during its time
11:18on the market.
11:19Between 27,000 and 55,000 of those patients die.
11:25Merck voluntarily withdraws Vioxx in September 2004.
11:29Not under regulatory order.
11:32A new clinical trial has made the cardiac data impossible to manage publicly any longer.
11:37They pull it themselves, before the FDA can act, and frame it as a responsible corporate
11:43decision.
11:44In 2007, Merck agrees to pay $4.85 billion to settle approximately 27,000 personal injury claims.
11:54No individual executive is charged with a crime.
11:58A separate $950 million settlement follows in 2011, including an admission of illegal marketing.
12:06The company continues operating.
12:09David Graham, the scientist who ran those numbers, is investigated by his own employer,
12:15the FDA, for going public.
12:19Purdue Pharma
12:21In 1996, Purdue Pharma launches OxyContin with a sales strategy built on one central claim.
12:28This opioid is different.
12:31It releases slowly.
12:32It is less addictive.
12:34Doctors can prescribe it freely.
12:36That claim is not supported by evidence.
12:39Purdue's own data suggests otherwise.
12:42The sales representatives are trained to say it anyway.
12:45OxyContin is reformulated as a 12-hour, slow-release pill.
12:49The slow-release mechanism is supposed to reduce the euphoric surge that drives addiction.
12:55In practice, the effects wear off in six to eight hours for many patients, leaving them
13:00in pain and early withdrawal twice a day.
13:03The solution offered to their doctors is a higher dose.
13:07Purdue builds a sales force of over 900 representatives by 2001, paid on commission, tied directly to
13:14prescription volume in their territories.
13:16They target high-prescribing physicians.
13:19They bring them to resort conferences.
13:22They hand out patient-starter coupons.
13:24The first prescription is free.
13:26Internal documents, released through litigation, show that Purdue executives identify suspected pill mills,
13:33clinics where OxyContin is clearly being diverted for non-medical use.
13:37They make a deliberate decision not to report these clinics to authorities.
13:42Because those clinics are also among their highest-volume customers.
13:47Between 1999 and 2021, approximately 600,000 Americans die of opioid overdose.
13:54Around 80% of heroin users report their addiction began with a prescription painkiller.
14:00In 2022, members of the Sackler family agree to pay $6 billion in a civil settlement.
14:06They face no criminal prosecution.
14:09They are permitted to retain billions in personal wealth transferred out of the company before
14:14the litigation began.
14:16Several major museums have since removed the Sackler name from their walls.
14:20Several have not.
14:22They lift that toward office, No.
14:34The precinct providingkęs for Sacler resonant.
14:35Everything is coming fromaha.