Episode Twenty-Three – On Big Pharma – Interview With Dr Leslie Cannold and Michael McRae

Welcome to Token Skeptic #23 – a discussion between Dr Leslie Cannold and Michael McRae on perceptions of pharmaceutical companies!

Firstly – my apologies about the sound quality for this particular episode, I have tried to improve the sound but unfortunately it’s as best as it can get.

After reading ‘The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot and talking to my students about medical ethics, and more recently, the Australian Vaccination Network – I really wanted to investigate the public perception of pharmaceutical companies and why it seems to have such a strange ‘either for or against!’ approach for many.

The questions I asked include:
What do you think is the public perception of pharmaceutical companies and why?
Have we learned from history about how drug companies gather and report results and are things improving?
What should be the future of pharmaceutical products and whose responsibility is it to make sure that happens?

The article that we discuss around the twenty-minute mark is ‘Ghost Stories’, by Richard Guilliat, published in the Australian Magazine on April 3rd, 2010, about the multinational drug firm Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the investigation into its promotion of Premarin hormone-replacement drugs.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/ghost-stories/story-e6frg8h6-1225848936455

Dr Leslie Cannold is an author, researcher, ethicist and vocalist. Her website is http://www.cannold.com

She worked for years at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, and now holds an Honorary Fellowship at Melbourne, as well as an Adjunct Senior Lecturer position at Monash University. Leslie sits on various boards and committees, including the ethics panel of the Infertility Treatment Authority and the Human Research and Ethics Committee of the Victorian Department of Human Services.

She is president of Reproductive Choice Australia and Pro-Choice Victoria, grass-roots advocacy groups that seek to maximise the reproductive rights and freedoms available to Australians. Leslie’s non-fiction works include the award-winning The Abortion Myth: Feminism, morality and the hard choices women make and What, No Baby: Why women are losing the freedom to mother, and how they can get it back, which made the Australian Financial Review’s top 101 books list in 2005. Her first novel will be published in Australia by Text early in 2011.