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Radio programmes on conflicts of interest and corruption

MeSci

MeSci

ME/CFS since 1995; activity level 6?
Messages
8,231
Location
Cornwall, UK
This was on BBC Radio 4 last night (19th August), Part 2 of the 'Conflicted Medicine' mini-series in the 'Inside Health' series. 'Inside Health' tends to be anodyne and often features very poor levels of rigour and unchallenged claims, but I recommend this particular podcast.

Summary:

Dr Mark Porter examines the hidden conflicts of interest that may affect how your GP or specialist treats you. He discovers that the advice patient groups give you is also not immune to the influences of organisations such as pharmaceutical companies.

Download from this page.

There was a programme afterwards documenting a horrific case where a French judge received death threats while investigating corruption involving multinational companies and senior politicians. As there are a number of multinational pharmaceutical corporations with multiple subsidiaries, this may well be relevant to the previous podcast. I think that a lot of politicians have shares in big pharma companies.

UK residents can listen here. Not sure if there is somewhere where people outside the UK can listen, but the judge's name is Eva Joly, and there are probably other sites where the case is documented.
 
MeSci

MeSci

ME/CFS since 1995; activity level 6?
Messages
8,231
Location
Cornwall, UK
I meant to mention that, near the end of the first programme, there are a couple of ideas about how to make research more independent of pharma companies, which I liked the sound of. One was to have a central fund into which participating companies (in the fund system) all contributed, and the money to be spent on research funded by any of them. Obviously there would need to be an independent, expert scrutinising body that decided what research to fund.

The other suggestion was a tax on pharma companies. Good luck with that, I say! Many (all?) of them probably have tax-avoidance strategies already (as referred to for multinationals in the second programme).
 
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