Category Archives: Whistleblowing

Whistleblowing is dangerous to your health

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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The Russell Crowe movie, The Insider, was an Academy Award-nominated film based on the true story of a corporate Big Tobacco whistleblower. Until he went public, Dr. Jeffrey Wigand had been Brown & Williamson’s $300,000-a-year research director, described by the Wall Street Journal as ”the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry”.

Dr. Wigand decided to go public by delivering a damning courtroom deposition against his employer – a move that eventually led to the tobacco industry’s $246 billion litigation settlement in 1998 to help pay for smoking-related health care bills in the U.S.

But it turns out that a conscientious employee like Dr. Wigand who blows the whistle on dangerous or illegal acts faces a significant personal health risk, too, according to research published in the British Medical Journal.

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‘Extreme exam anxiety’ – disability or excuse?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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I’m thinking of getting my PhD from the University of Manitoba. Apparently, Winnipeg’s U of M will waive normal requirements for a PhD for those students claiming to suffer from extreme exam anxiety. I’m pretty sure I may have that. And a U of M whistleblower has now been suspended for protesting the doctorate in mathematics awarded to a U of M student who:

  • lacked the academic requirements for such a degree
  • had failed a required Comprehensive Candidacy exam two times
  • was then informed that the requirement to pass the exam would be waived – all because of this extreme exam anxiety.

To save time and money, to avoid those Winnipeg winters, and to minimize my own extreme exam anxiety, perhaps the University of Manitoba could just drop my PhD credentials in the mail for me. Isn’t that what other no-class diploma mills do when they decide to throw academic requirements out the window?
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Two nurses fired for reporting doctor’s inappropriate actions

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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This has bizarre backwoods good ol’ boy written all over it, no offense to good ol’ boys: two American nurses, Vicki Galle and Anne Mitchell who, until they were fired in June, had been employed by the Winkler County Memorial Hospital in Kermit, West Texas for over 20 years.  The two nurses not only lost their jobs at the small hospital, they are now facing criminal charges of misuse of official information, which, under the truly frightening Texas Penal Code,  is a third-degree felony with a penalty of 2-10 years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. * see updates below

What evil did Vicki and Anne perpetrate to merit this fate?  On April 7th, 2009 they reported to the Texas Medical Board their concerns about Dr. Rolando Arafiles, one of three physicians on contract with the hospital. Arafiles, they claimed, was improperly encouraging patients to buy his own herbal “medicines”, among other concerns.

Arafiles in return filed a harassment complaint with the county sheriff’s department against the nurses. The subsequent criminal charges of misuse of official information claim that the nurses “sent patient files to the state medical board in an attempt to ‘harm, harass or annoy’ one of the hospital’s physicians”. The files included the medical record numbers of the patients affected, although no patient names were disclosed.     Continue reading →

Drug Rep Confidential

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Watch this revealing 4-minute interview with pharmaceutical company sales reps, courtesy of Pharmed Out, an “independent, publicly funded project that empowers physicians to identify and counter inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices”.  The voices have been distorted to protect the identities of the two drug reps chatting about what happens when they visit your doctor.

From rewarding heavy prescribers to off-label marketing (promoting a drug for conditions it has not been legally approved to safely treat), these two men offer an eye-opening yet disturbing take on ‘detailing‘ – what goes on behind closed doors.   Continue reading →