Hemophiliacs, hepatitis and HIV: A magic cure gone wrong

The dark side of capitalism’s effect on the medical and pharmaceutical industries is chillingly exposed in Doctor Guilt? Benefits of Medical Treatment Compared with Hazards – A tradeoff (published by iUniverse), the provocative new nonfiction by Everett Winslow Lovrien, M.D.

Hemophilia is a medical disorder, more prominent in males, that causes severe pain, uncontrollable bleeding and crippling deformities. Until recently, most of those affected did not survive until adulthood. But in the late 1970s, a new medicine became available for treating hemophilia’s bleeding episodes, and it was heralded as a magic medicine that would dramatically improve the quality of life for hemophiliacs, prevent death and promote a healthy growth into adulthood.

The new medicine was widely embraced and families were ecstatic to see the positive results it was having on hemophilia patients. This sense of security would be shattered in 1982, when those persons who had been infused with the new medicine began to become ill with a new, mysterious disease, the condition that would be identified the following year as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Doctor Guilt?

Everett Winslow Lovrien, M.D. attended medical school at the University of Minnesota and interned at the San Diego County Hospital before moving back to St. Paul, Minn., to begin a general practice. He then studied pediatrics and medical genetics, eventually developing a medical genetics program in Portland, Ore. He is the co-author of nearly 100 scientific articles and retired from the University of Oregon’s medical school in 1996 as a professor of medical genetics and pediatrics.

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