Hip Implants Causing SEVERE Metal Poisoning In Patients

More lawsuits are being filed against the makers of metal-on-metal hip implants after complaints emerged of metal poisoning from the devices. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this issue.

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More lawsuits are being filed against the makers of metal-on-metal hip implants after complaints emerged of metal poisoning from the devices. Now, full disclosure, as you know, we handled the first set of DePuy cases that came out. We were actually involved in the leadership to discovery in that case. We settled that first round of cases.

But what we learned was startling, actually. What we learned was that there's cobalt ... When you rub metal on metal in the human body, synergistically, you create chemicals. There's already cobalt in the metal, but synergistically, those chemicals are very toxic and they move through your ... They move systemically through every organ system. It's no difference than a heavy metal poisoning. To some degree, this is even worse. We found neurological diseases because as you might imagine, it affects the neurological system. You found issues with heart. If you just go look at the classic symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, you'd find all of them here. In the documents, the first go around on the documents, it was very evident they knew about it, they talked about it, they had doctors saying, "Hey, I have these people that are presenting with classic symptoms of metal poisoning." When they would open the patient up, the area around the implants sometimes was necrotic. The damage was set, so it actually damaged the tissue all around the joint, the hip joint. That's a massive joint. The necrosis was a huge problem obviously for the tissue around.

Then the biggest problem was you really couldn't fix it. In other words, there was so much damage in the area where the hip joint was connecting up to where the implant was, you just couldn't fix it because so much damage had occurred around the connective tissue.

What's your take on this story?

Well, you know, these hip implants, these DePuy ASRs, they'd actually been voluntarily recalled many years ago. A lot of patients obviously the thought of having to undergo another major hip surgery, you know, you're out of commission for months, really, especially consider. Some of them were not able to do it. They understood the risks and they weren't able. But now they're also developing the problems. [crosstalk 00:02:28].

In other words, you're saying it was too early for them to do it back then.

Right. Right. So, they didn't. They had just come off it. It's really hard for them to do this. You talked about that case. We've got this one here that's a continuation of that. DePuy has kind of been one of the repeat offenders here. That's a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. We've seen it with a lot of their products. Not all of them, but a lot. You almost kind of get the sense-

When you see Johnson & Johnson product, it sounds like a real overstatement but it's not, these cases, I've handled 35 years, just nothing but pharmaceutical cases, medical device cases, but there's kind of a joke in the industry. When you see J&J involved with a lawsuit and somebody's saying there's a problem, most of the time there is. Of course, now, it's just not pharmaceuticals. It's devices, it's talc, and [inaudible 00:03:25] it goes on forever the problems that this company's having. I don't know how they're going to weather all of this, to be honest with you. But this is a real case and people now, because there's a latency, the implant's put in, you want to hope for the best. A lot of these people said, "Well, I want to hope for the best." To go in and say, "I want this removed and replaced," I mean, that is a major, major surgery. The older people become ... I mean, one of the classic kind of ways that people at the end of their lives, it's typically centered around a broken hip. It's a major kind of surgery. It's not like, "I want to just go in and remove this DePuy." It's not that easy, is it?