Due Justice

Chapter 33

Tampa, Florida

Monday 7:15 a.m.

January 25, 1999

When George and I got home, Carly was still down for the count. We’d consumed too much caffeine and too much tension to sleep.

We put Morgan’s report in the computer and read it before we did anything else.

Carly had unencrypted the whole disk allowing us to review the entire document.

The Silicone Solution report was long, complicated, and technical. Written for peers, not the general public like us.

I read through it a couple of times, skimming most of the medical jargon and the scientific recitations, which didn’t mean much to me anyway.

Morgan said he had been a member of the medical staff at Mid-Florida University hospital in Tampa and on the faculty for several years back in the 1970s and 80s. Later in his career, the University allowed him to return to teaching after he’d lost his license to practice medicine, mainly because he promised to bring in grants and do a great deal of research.

He said grants to study the effects of silicone on the human body were easier to get. When the FDA declared a moratorium on breast implants, several of the larger manufacturers immediately donated money for research grants to prove the implants were safe and effective. Morgan’s grant was funded by MedPro.

He summarized his research, including the disproved allergy theory.

The report contained tedious details, but the bottom line was no such allergy existed.

Given how ubiquitous silicone is in products I use every day, I was glad to read as much.

However, like the accidental discovery of the glue that didn’t stick leading to the invention of those ubiquitous un-sticky note pads, Dr. Morgan said he found something significant instead. He called his answer “Morgan’s Syndrome.”

Morgan said it’s only been within the last century that the immune system has been recognized as the single major determinant of health and disease.

His scholarly and scientific explanation seemed to boil down to this:  the immune system is a sophisticated scanning device that searches out and eliminates anything foreign.

When the immune system is compromised or absent, it fails to detect and destroy bacteria causing diseases and allows the body to attack itself, like AIDS.

Morgan described exciting new work in psychoneuroimmunology: the relation of the mind to the body’s immune system.

He said recent studies proved conclusively that the brain and the immune systems talk to each other and are interdependent.

Morgan said emotional conflict undermines physical health and absence of stress promotes health.

Oversimplifying, Morgan’s conclusion was that the “victimizing” of women by their own lawyers and the media, coupled with unscrupulous doctors willing to make a misdiagnosis without scientific support and to prescribe treatment, along with the hysteria around the supposed ill effects of free floating silicone in the body, had resulted in a psychoneuroimmunologic illness: Morgan’s Syndrome.

“In other words,” George said, “after all that, Dr. Morgan’s great Silicone Solution is that they think themselves sick. How did Kate put it? You get what you expect to get.”

He stretched and moved to the veranda seeking daylight.

I wondered who would have killed Morgan for that?