Frederick held his thumb against the fingerprint reader on his phone, and steeled himself for the latest round of abuse from Mrs Lace-Platte. He hated that he heard her deep, snarky voice in his head when he read her emails. On his worst days, he could clearly picture her shark-eyed stare too, which was not at all relieved by the false eyelashes and dark eyeshadow someone had convinced her to wear since mid-summer. He knew she was married with a young son, but he just couldn't imagine her having a deep need to feel girlish or attractive for any romantic notions. Maybe Frederick was being unfairly cynical about her, but he believed that it was just one more way for her to manipulate her audience. Everything about Cindy was a cold calculation. This must be no different.
As expected, the email was another attempt to massage the data points that Frederick was compiling. They had made it through clinical trials with a new drug for diabetic nerve pain, and generally the side effects were of the standard variety, with the usual assortment of dizziness, dry mouth, constipation, and insomnia. Liver toxicity seemed minimal, and there were almost no cases of decreased libido, so Cindy was convinced this one would probably be an easy sell. The problem was, there was a statistically significant occurrence of weight gain with the drug, compared to the control group, and those who gained weight gained a lot of it. If the point was to help diabetics who were barely mobile because of neuropathy in their extremities, then adding an extra twenty-five pounds of downward pressure on their feet wasn't going to help them get up and moving.
He had told Cindy before, there were strict guidelines for how to report all reported side effects from the clinical trials, and the math wasn't going to change on his side of the FDA forms. Once she started the advertising campaigns, he knew she would fall back on the same wording she always used to cover the company's ass. "This drug is believed to affect certain neural pathways..." It made it sound like they had no idea how any of this actually worked. To people like Cindy, it was probably better to let everyone think that. First line of defense when long-term effects start to go south.
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