Table of contents with summaries

3.4. A medical official at the National Institutes of Health denies the danger from nursery lights and assures US Senator Feingold that all is well. 

Letter from Linda L. Wright, M.D., Special Assistant to the Director, Center of Research for Mothers and Children, National Institutes of Health, dated March 17, 1993, to U.S. Senator Russ Feingold who had asked her to comment on my IATROGENICS article.

Dr. Wright denies the danger but avoids addressing its documentation. Instead, she misrepresents the clinical literature and quotes the same non-existent clinical paper as Dr.Kushner to back up her invented assertions.

My reply to Senator Feingold, April 24, 1993, in which I expose Dr. Wright's arguments as inaccurate, untenable, and misleading.  I point out her willful omissions, errors and fabrications, and that the National Eye Institute funded the planning of an unethical and deliberately misleading trial designed to perpetuate the blinding. Then I discuss how so many doctors can so easily become so malignant.

Some highlights:

• Dr. Wright did not dispute my irradiance calculations or their safety implications.

• Test animals picked for the similarity of their eye development to that of human babies went blind quickly under lights comparable to standard nursery lamps.

• An inverted medical logic considers the removal of bright light as a treatment, as if wombs had fluorescent ceiling lights.

• It confuses the removal of a danger, which must be done upon finding any positive association between it and a concurrent harm, with the introduction of a new treatment that must show a strong positive association with a benefit before its use can be considered.

• Dr. Wright and her colleagues bend their standards of evidence to suit whatever is to be demonstrated.

• The National Eye Institute should learn from the ancient Roman medical advice to observe the effect on the patients, and not deny it from theory.

• The National Eye Institute's LIGHT-ROP trial plan used a study design that the Executive Editor at the New England Journal of Medicine had described as an unacceptable example of unethical experimentation on humans.

• The LIGHT-ROP trial plan says there are compelling reasons to believe that light will damage the preemies' retinae, and no plausible argument for the "extremely unlikely possibility " that shading could harm them in any way. Yet, that plan's proponents propose to protect only some of the preemies from the believed light hazard and to leave thousands of others exposed to see how many will be harmed how badly.

• Moreover, even the so-called protected babies were to receive the alleged protection too late to do any good, with the full knowledge of the trial authors and proponents. If that unethical and unscientific trial had been held, it would therefore have wrongly exonerated the nursery lighting and assured that the blinding continues unchallenged.

(Note : The application for the full-scale trial based on this trial plan progressed through all its scheduled approval stages until the National Eye Institute told me in March 1994 that this trial had been refused funding. However, see page 213 for their latest letter: a slightly smaller version of this trial has meanwhile been funded anyway.)

• The LIGHT-ROP trial plan is similar in concept to the infamous Nazi doctors' hypothermia studies - deliberately inflicting harmful doses to measure their effects.

• The fate of patients is clearly not a medical concern, but fascinating theories are.

• Dr. Wright offered the help of three physicians but all three had already disqualified themselves from honest discussion by their reckless  suppression of the unrefuted hazard warning.

• Detachment is an occupational disease among reality-impaired physicians who treat patients as abstractions, not as people, and so become malignant.

• How a mother had to discover and fight against the modern horror of pediatric surgeons vivisecting babies because their doctrine asserted babies feel no pain.

• Physicians who can be made to believe such patent absurdities are a danger to the public.

• Trusting this kind of "health care" is like traveling on the Titanic.

My reply to Dr. Wright, April 25, 1993, sending her a copy of my above letter to Senator Feingold and challenging her to either refute my warnings with documented facts, or else to protect preemies from the blinding excess light. I received no reply.

3. 5. Explaining to parents that their baby's eyes will be exposed to unneeded harm?

My letter to Rand Spencer, M.D., Baylor College of Medicine, Dallas, dated January 31, 1993. Dr. Spencer was at that time the lead author of the LIGHT-ROP clinical trial planning grant application funded by the National Eye Institute.

I sent him my IATROGENICS paper and reminded him of his duty to inform the parents of the preemies to be enrolled in the experiment about all the risks and dangers from light exposure he had cited in his grant application, plus those in my safety alert if he could not refute them.

Dr. Spencer's reply of March 27, 1993, belittling the danger and contradicting much of his own writing from the grant application.

My reply to Dr. Spencer, April 25, 1993, pointing out his contradictions and questioning the ethics of wanting to expose babies to known harm just to measure the damage.

3.6. The National Institute of Child Health
on Cruise Control in Kafka's Castle:

My letter to Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, dated January 23, 1993, alerting her to the safety violation and ongoing blinding.

Reply on Secretary Shalala's behalf, dated May 21, 1993, from Duane Alexander, Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

This letter is identical to Dr. Wright's above March 17 letter which I had already refuted a month earlier, with only a new date pasted in.  This illustrates how the National Institute of Child Health runs on automatic pilot, without human attention to a 50-year-old epidemic that blinds more children than all other causes combined, and that kills or maims many others.

My reply to Dr. Alexander, June 4, 1993, complaining about the lack of response from him and about his inaction regarding Dr. Wright's failure to document her assertions.  I received no reply.

My letter to Secretary Shalala, June 4, 1993, complaining about the Kafkaesque run-around I get from her staff while the baby-blinding continues.

Reply on Secretary Shalala's behalf from Philip R. Lee, M.D., Assistant Secretary for Health, dated August 5, 1993.

Dr. Lee cites again the same phantom study that was not published where he and his staff said it was, and avoids again any discussion of the documented safety violation. He simply asserts ex cathedra that there is insufficient evidence against the nursery lighting to protect the babies from it, all while he and his staff suppress that evidence.

Extract from Abstracts and Meeting program sent by Dr. Lee.

My letter to Dr. Philip R. Lee, dated October 4, 1993. 

I requested that he and his staff back up their false assertions, and that they end the blinding if they can not refute the warning. I also asked him to discontinue the cover-up of the scandal which is bound to be exposed, and I reminded him of his duty to the public. I received no reply.

Letter from Judith Stein, Freedom of Information Officer at the National Eye Institute, of March 23, 1994, stating that the LIGHT-ROP trial application had not been funded. (See page 213 for the later reversal of this decision.)

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