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Saturday, February 09, 2008
Complaint Against Wulsin’s Medical License: “This is Still an Active Investigation.”
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
Photo courtesy of here.
As we reported last year, the National Council Against Health Fraud filed a November 3, 2006 complaint against the Ohio medical license of Dr. Victoria Wulsin. Recently, the Enquirer’s “Politics Extra” blog and the Ohio Daily Blog have posted items and comments questioning the accuracy and status of the complaint.
Today, Dr. Robert Baratz, who signed the NCAHF complaint, sent the following e-mail in response to an inquiry from Ashley DiAna, a staffer at the Steve Black for Congress campaign. (FYI, last week we submitted related questions to Steve Black and Vic Wulsin. Watch the Beacon for upcoming reports about their responses!)
Dear Ms. DiAna:
I am responding as an individual to your recent email, which was delayed in getting to me. You may reproduce, distribute, and promulgate my response.
November 3, 2006—I authored and submitted a request for investigation regarding an Ohio-licensed physician, Victoria Wells (Wulsin), License #35.058016, to the Ohio State Medical Board. This was through their complaint process and involved several serious issues under Section 4731.22 of the Ohio Revised Code. The request involved investigation regarding deviation from the standard of care, unprofessional conduct, and false and misleading advertising. Specific examples were given and documented with the request.
I received a written reply from the Board that the matter had been referred for investigation. The letter stated that active investigations are confidential, however, the letter went on to state that I would be notified at the conclusion of this investigation. I have not been notified that this matter has been concluded, and thus this remains an open and active investigation. I have been contacted on several occasions by Board investigators and, based on information I cannot reveal here, understand that this is still an active investigation.
While the specifics of this investigation are confidential, the issues that were brought to the Board’s attention for investigation are not. They are quite serious, and include among them activities regarding highly questionable human experimentation conducted at an Ohio institution which receives federal funding. These matters include, but are not limited to, use of unapproved biological agents in human experimentation, lack of informed consent in human experimentation, failure to treat patients with treatable diseases akin to the notorious, unethical Tuskegee experiments, alteration of reports, and violations of the Code of Federal Regulations.
Salient details of the Tuskegee experiments are described in a report from National Public Radio, excerpted below:
Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.
For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance.
At the start of the study, there was no proven treatment for syphilis. But even after penicillin became a standard cure for the disease in 1947, the medicine was withheld from the men. The Tuskegee scientists wanted to continue to study how the disease spreads and kills. The experiment lasted four decades, until public health workers leaked the story to the media.
By then, dozens of the men had died, and many wives and children had been infected.
The matters brought to the Ohio State Medical Board’s attention are entirely similar in substance.
Based on the information I have, in my opinion, Victoria Wells Wulsin’s released statement, “The Ohio State Medical Board has taken no action against Wulsin because the charges are false” is both false and misleading. To my knowledge the State of Ohio has not made a finding in this case. I made no “charges” against Victoria Wells Wulsin, but merely requested an investigation. For her campaign to have used the terminology “charges” suggests that the Ohio State Medical Board has made formal charges against her. As noted earlier, I have not been notified by the Ohio State Medical Board that their investigation has been concluded.
Robert S. Baratz, MD, PhD, DDS
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10 Feb 2008 at 12:08 am | #
I’m a proud lifelong Democrat and if this turns into a mess for Wulsin, I blame the party bosses who handed her the nomination. They can’t claim they didn’t know what might be in the pipeline. The Beacon was running stories hot & heavy about the license complaint two, count ‘em, two years ago. Did they all think this wasn’t going to rear its ugly head during the current silly season? Black has already beaned Wulsin with this. Anybody expecting Schmidt to be shy?
Before giving her the green light this time around, did the party even ask Wulsin if she’d been notified by the medical board? I doubt it. I imagine the vetting process went something like this: Wearing one of her nicely-tailored pants suits, Wulsin showed up with some money and the party said, “Okay.”
As for Wulsin, how could she be so foolish to work for Heimlich long after these experiments had been exposed as total bat-shidd crazy? She knew how bad this could look if it came out, but she closed her eyes and rolled the dice anyway. (Harvard? Ugh. When it comes to politicians, I’ll take a UMass streetfighter any day of the week.)
I can only imagine Barry Bennett, chuckling quietly at the thought of these useless Democrats. I envy him. He doesn’t have to lift a finger because the idiots running our party do such a superb job of blindly driving it into a ditch.
10 Feb 2008 at 08:28 am | #
Slewfoot, thanks for your comment. You have summed up the point I have been trying to make this whole time. Party loyalists will act like our work on Wulsin is because we want Jean Schmidt to win.
That is not true. I do not wish Jean Schmidt to win. However, that does not mean we should turn a blind eye to Wulsin’s involvement in human atrocities.
Wulsin’s lame “report” tries to have it both ways. She has lines saying that evidence indicates malariotherapy is not effective. Her supporters quote those lines endlessly. But they neglect that she analyzed data from human subjects without turning in the Heimlich Institute. They ignore the fact that she also wanted to rename malariotherapy “immunotherapy” and continue further discussions with the mining companies—who runs gold mines in Africa, the perfect location for AIDS infected subjects.
15 Feb 2008 at 01:43 pm | #
The Ohio State Medical Board has taken no action against Dr. Wulsin. The complaint was filed in 2006, and they have not done so yet because there is no evidence supporting the claim. The claim is that she participated in experiments. However, from both her public report and the press coverage of her role (two feature-length articles in Cincinnati Magazine and Radar Magazine) it is clear that all she did was review data.
Her report states she was unable to perform a full evaluation of the experiments because “no written protocol is available,” discrepancies existed in the data, “even internal documents… are not obtainable” and she was not given the opportunity to speak to contacts on the ground or perform site visits.
Beyond that, Dr. Wulsin emphasizes the importance of ethical standards on multiple occasions throughout the report, and directly addresses concerns about research in Africa and China. Dr. Wulsin was clearly aware of the ethical issues and potential for controversy.
Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Wulsin’s contract with the Heimlich institute was terminated the day after her draft report was submitted. Again, this is well documented in the press coverage, and indicates that they were unhappy with the conclusions she reached, including that:
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that neither malaria nor Immunotherapy will cure HIV/AIDS.”
“‘Fishing expeditions’ for possible benefits are no longer warranted.”
This makes it pretty obvious that she was not a part of any unethical experimentation, and that she in fact works against such practices.
15 Feb 2008 at 08:46 pm | #
Regarding Dr. Wulsin, I am having a difficult time understanding what motivates the charges being made against her. I did see the entry claiming that her campaign’s use of that word indicates that something official has taken place but would suggest that these people examine all the definitions of that word before making statements of this nature that reveal an obvious bias on their part.
I have read the report that Dr. Wulsin wrote for the Heimlich Institute and frankly do not see any indication that she participated in any wrongdoing either legal or ethical.
It appears that Dr. Wulsin was employed to analyze and report on a specific project of this Institute. She did just that and there doesn’t appear to be any indication that she was an active participant or proponent of that project other than in this role. This is a standard practice in scientific/engineering circles. It is generally refered to as a design or peer review. The purpose of these reviews is to examine the design or study for accuracy or flaws. Pointing out strong points or weaknesses is an essential part of this process. Those doing the reviewing ideally represent a certain expertise and perform the review from this perspective. The goal is to supply additional and valuable information to improve the design, validate, or disprove the basis of the study. It appears that this is exactly what this report did, nothing more or less.
As for the specifics of the study, as Dr. Wulsin points out there is a history which supports immunotherapy for some diseases and even the early evidence supported malariotherapy (a form of immunotherapy) as being effective in fighting HIV infections. She also did her job by reporting that more recent evidence was negative regarding this procedure as she did also by noting the clinical weaknesses of the various studies cited.
As with any study regarding health issues there is an ethical question when some in the study receive the new drug/treatment and others get only a placebo. This happens with every new drug or treatment option and is, many times, the only way that real evaluations of the new drug or treatment can be made. The real question here is how best to do it so that it causes the least amount of harm. Dr. Wulsin’s report outlines the generally agreed upon procedures for doing this and does not indicate any support for continuing with this study.
Now, I am just an engineer, not a medical professional, but it appears to me that Dr. Wulsin did an excellent job in reviewing this study.
03 Mar 2008 at 10:40 pm | #
I find these allegations outrageous. I have reviewed the report. You should too. http://www.scribd.com/doc/1944983/Dr-Wulsins-malariotherapy-prospectus-for-the-Heimlich-Institute
Dr. Wulsin was not involved in the experiments and merely researched and reported on experiments being conducted by others. She did not approve them and concluded they were not adequately controlled to be valuable research.
I have to conclude these attacks are strictly politically motivated. Shame on you and Steve Black.