Remove the Corporate Leaders of the Brigham and Women's Hospital

In October 2013, Dr. Amy Reed was critically harmed at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where her husband trained and was a surgeon. She went in for a surgery to remove a fibroid that doctors told her was benign. It turns out that she had uterine leiomyosarcoma, an aggressive cancer.

The technique that Amy's doctor used during the fibroid surgery was called "morcellation,"which allows the doctor to complete the procedure more quickly, do more surgeries each day, and make the hospital more money. What this technique did to Amy was chop up the cancerous tissue and spread it all over her abdominal cavity - essentially giving her man-made stage 4 cancer.  

Over the course of 20 years, doctors using the morcellation technique have put hundreds of thousands of women across the United States and the world at risk. But it wasn't until Amy and her husband raised an alarm and forced the FDA to restrain this practice that hospitals started to stop using morcellation as a standard practice.

Disturbingly, the Brigham and Women's Hospital’s upper leadership had known about the problem for at least two years. Other women had been harmed and some had avoidably or prematurely died at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital after the morcellation technique was used on them. But because the practice was profitable and easy, and because only a minority of women would die from the procedure, they suppressed the information from the public and did not raise a national alarm.

The following leaders at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital are responsible for suppressing information that could have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of women worldwide:

Dr. Robert Barbieri MD, chief of Gynecology.

Dr. Stan Ashley MD, Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Elizabeth Nabel MD, President.

Dr. Ron Walls MD, Chief Operating Officer.

Dr. Michael Muto MD, fellowship director in Gynecological Oncology.

Not only did these members of Boston’s leading academic medical establishment, these Harvard professors, not move with resolve to protect women in harm’s way – they attempted to suppress efforts to stop morcellation. At a time when Amy was most vulnerable, the hospital leadership even resorted to corporate intimidation and bullying tactics to shut down the campaign.

 

Please remove and replace the current leadership of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The hospital should be run by men and women of integrity, who understand that saving people’s lives is more important than institutional interests, egos, and money. 

 

There are many Brigham physicians who honor their professional vows to act ethically and with strength to protect lives – but they are not leading the Brigham. They are marginalized and live in the shadows of that institution