Fall Semester Date Change

Classes for the Fall 1998 semester will begin on Thursday, August 20. This is a change from the previously scheduled date of August 24.

Contents

Professor Points Finger at Breast Implant Doctors, Manufacturers for Women's Suffering

Schedule of Events

Faculty Activities & Publications

Schedule of Events

July 29

After-the-Bar Beach Party, Room 3-East, 5:15 p.m.

Professor Points Finger at Breast Implant Doctors, Manufacturers for Women's Suffering

Women have been carrying the blame for the side effects resulting from their decisions to have breast implants, but Professor Julie Spanbauer says the finger of blame should be pointing at doctors. In most cases they failed to adequately inform patients of known risks with relatively high occurrence rates.

"At a minimum, women who were contemplating breast implant surgery should have been told what kind of testing had, or in this case, had not been done, so that they could have made a meaningful choice about whether to assume the long-term risks and uncertainties of breast implants," Spanbauer wrote in her piece, "Breast Implants and Beauty Ritual: Woman's Sceptre and Prison," in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.

She also argues that the manufacturers are to blame for their failure to test breast implants on women before introducing them in 1962 as a safe product.

From the perspective of physicians, the legal requirements of disclosure and patient consent involve only disclosing the risks and benefits of recommended procedures, she discovered. Doctors generally limit disclosure because they believe their patients are incapable of making sound decisions regarding complex medical information, Spanbauer argues.

The thinking is that patients "cannot critically assess the information and make the decision to undergo treatment which is in their best medical interest," she found. Patients are thus spoon fed what the physician believes they should know. "In reality, these assumptions about medical care are not protective; instead, they deny the woman the right to make her own decision," Spanbauer believes.

At the same time, manufacturers of medical devices are insulated from liability under the learned intermediary doctrine which puts the burden on the doctor, who in this case is the intermediary, to state the dangers or risks, Spanbauer explains. "Prior to 1992, neither the physician nor the manufacturer were required to pass along (informational) package inserts to prospective silicone breast implant recipients that described the product's potential dangers," she said.

Few women questioned the doctors' judgments because advertising by these manufacturers assured women of product safety. There was never mention of the failure to test implants on humans before marketing, or attempts to minimize known breast implant side effects with relatively high occurrence rates.

Two major settlement agreements offer compensation to women. The first agreement, approved in 1995, involves three of the largest breast implant manufacturers, and the second, awaiting final approval, involves Dow Corning. Both agreements have been criticized by implant recipients and their attorneys for offering insufficient compensation.

"You can understand a doctor's paternalism when he's treating someone for a disease and thinks that if this patient doesn't accept this treatment, he or she will be hurting themselves," the professor says. "That's not what elective surgery is about. Doctors aren't caretakers in that instance. For elective surgery, the doctor becomes more of a seller of a service."

Spanbauer offers omissions and misstatements in medical publications regarding the tragic side effects of breast implants as evidence of her conclusion. She also points to other evidence including, physician assurances that breast implants would offer an "improved quality of life" and physician characterization of a new illness classification, "micromastia," for small breasted women whose illness was deemed to be both a physical and psychological malady.

"In the context of elective surgery, however, doctors have a much higher duty to inform because this is about a woman's choice to undergo elective breast implant surgery," Spanbauer stresses. She points to pages of documentation that show doctors withheld facts regarding side-effects and offered psychological arguments when discussing the need for breast implant surgery.

Faculty Activity and Publications

Professor Arthur J. Sabin

Publication

Professor Arthur J. Sabin's book Red Scare in Court was cited a number of times in the just published book Many Are The Crimes - McCarthyism In America, by Ellen Schrecker. Professor Schrecker's book was featured in the Sunday, July 19, 1998 Tribune "Books" section and was also reviewed inThe New York Times "Book Week."