Check Facts About Breat Implants

Silicone breast implants, it turns out, don’t appear to cause serious diseases in women.

That’s the conclusion of researchers at the Harvard Medical School.

After studying the medical histories of 87,000 women from 1976 to 1990, the researcher announced a few days ago they found no connection between silicone breast implants and connective tissue diseases such as lupus.

This should calm the fears, slow the lawsuits, and largely end the debate about health risks associated with silicone implants.

Except this is America, land of too many lawyers and TV talk shows.

Instead of allowing rigorous medical studies to decide whether breast implants endanger women, we leave it to Oprah, Connie Chung and a hive of greedy lawyers.

They did a number on this one.

Manufacturers of silicone breast implants already agreed a year ago to a $4 billion settlement with women who had sued them.

And just before the Harvard study was released, the Dow Corning Corp., the largest of the silicone implant companies, filed for bankruptcy.

The verdict is all but in on silicone breast implants. They aren’t a major health risk.

Unfortunately, the trial already is over and the judgment about to be paid.

This late 20th-century American propensity to orchestrate fear and manipulate the law without regard to the facts will prove more deadly to our society than many of the supposed ills we are trying to remedy.

This is why doctors won’t deliver babies.

It is why we don’t have a place to store nuclear waste.

It’s part of the reason most of us swim in a pond of perpetual worry that everything we eat, drink or take as a prescription might be facilitating our demise.

Dr. James Brinkman, a Spokane plastic surgeon, has seen first-hand the human toll caused by all the hoo-hah over silicone breast implants.

“Really, it was like a kind of public hysteria developed,” said the man who has personally implanted silicone breasts in more than 900 women.

“For years, I have seen women come crying into my office, sitting there with their families, worrying that their lives and health were ruined,” he said.

“It was like they were hearing propaganda in North Korea or Vietnam. They have been told the same message over and over again until finally it wore them down.”

Dr. Brinkman doesn’t dispute that some women who have had breast implants later experience pain and physical problems. “But the problems we surgeons saw were just very different from what the courtroom kept talking about,” he said.

Surgeons know that some small number of breast-implant patients are plagued by the buildup of scar tissue or a condition called capsule constricture where the lining around the implant becomes hard.

“But in the vast majority of cases these problems weren’t related to any immune system diseases for which implants were blamed.”

No matter.

The stampede to vilify breast implants and then litigate against their supposed evils took on a life of its own.

Freed from facts, fueled by greed, and fanned by fears of women who felt sick and sore and wanted an easy explanation of why, the $4 billon juggernaut rolled on.

“At first, it was worthwhile to try to talk women through the facts,” Dr. Brinkman recalled of the early years of the scare. “After a while it became futile. People already had their minds made up. Families had told them of the dangers, friends had told them, there wasn’t a magazine rack that didn’t have a front page about the dangers. There just wasn’t any use in trying to talk about it.”

We have to learn to talk about true risk and recognize false danger.

As we move into an ever-more technologically complex society, our growing inability to sort through risks and hysteria will pose tremendous problems.

Soon, we must decide the costs and benefits of pesticides and biotechnology.

Early in the next century we will be facing questions about the pluses and minuses of altering the very genetic make-up of humans.

Can we live with the uncertainty of a few bad outcomes? If the silicone implant model of assessing risk and damage becomes the norm, institutions and individuals surely will be paralyzed by inaction and wrong judgments.

There are times when class-action lawsuits against bad medical devices are warranted. The Dalkon Shield birth control lawsuits are one such example. But there, the facts were first, the litigation came later.

The sad, outrageous history of the silicone breast implant scare is made worse by that fact that even in our zeal to agitate and litigate without the facts, we ignore some of the very biggest problems standing right in front of every family in the country.

Check the mortality tables.

Four of the the top causes of death in this country - heart disease, lung cancer, stroke and emphysema - all are related to smoking.

Every family knows someone ravaged by alcohol.

We need to learn where to place our panic, where to file our lawsuits and know the difference between a genuine problem and an implant.

, DataTimes