Ken Harvey (professor)

Ken Harvey is an adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University.[1] Described by The Age as an "anti-quackery crusader", Harvey is an advocate of evidence-based medicine and a critic of pharmaceutical marketing and unproven diet products.[2]

Harvey quit his job as an adjunct associate professor with La Trobe university in 2014 after the university agreed to receive $15 million from Swisse Wellness to fund a new complementary medicine centre.[2][3] Swisse has sued the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for defamation after a consumer advocacy show The Checkout criticised their research methods.[4][5]

Ken Harvey is a critic of drug promotion by pharmaceutical companies,[6] and supports a campaign called "No Advertising Please" that calls on doctors to reject free lunches from drug company representatives (who selectively present evidence that goes in a new drug's favour), and instead to only prescribe drugs that they have independently researched, including reading critical evaluations. Harvey served as a consumer representative on Medicines Australia's transparency working group, that advocated for patients to be able to know whether their doctors had been given free flights to industry funded conferences that promote new drugs.[7][8] Harvey has called on the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration "to ban inaccurate, misleading or unethical promotion of medicines" - and is a strong critic of the way that therapeutic claims of complementary medicines are regulated.[9][10] Harvey has criticised the TGA for not regulating body building products that contain synthetic amphetamines, which are instead regulated as food products despite making health claims.[11]

The Australian consumer advocacy organisation Choice gave Harvey a "Consumer Champion" award at their 2012 Shonky Awards event, which also awards "shonkies" to companies that make bogus and misleading product claims. Harvey criticised the Reckitt Benckiser brand Neurofen for marketing identical ibuprofen products in different packages as "targeting" specific pain, which became the subject of an ACCC investigation.[12][13]

Harvey was sued for alleged defamation by a company that markets products claimed to offer weight loss benefits, which attempted to delete all correspondence with an Internet marketing company while under investigation by the ACCC.[14]

In 2015, Stephen Leeder was sacked as the Editor-In-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia after criticizing the decision to outsource production of the journal to the global publishing giant Elsevier.[15] All but one of the AMJ's editorial advisory committee resigned following the decision to sack Leeder, and wrote to AMA president Brian Owler asking him to review the decision.[16] Ken Harvey supported Leeder and said that his sacking, and the use of Elsevier is "a mistake that is fairly irredeemable"[3]

References

  1. ↑ "Ken Harvey". The Conversation.
  2. 1 2 "Academic quits over Swisse deal with uni". The Age. 5 Feb 2014.
  3. 1 2 "Medical Journal of Australia will be shunned by researchers after editor sacked, academic says". The Guardian. 4 May 2015.
  4. ↑ Butler, Ben (2 May 2013). "ABC show defamed me, Swisse patriarch claims". The Age. Retrieved 31 May 2014.
  5. ↑ Ross, Annabel (3 May 2013). "ABC keeps Swisse segment online despite legal action". The Age. Retrieved 31 May 2014.
  6. ↑ "Code breaches". Medical Journal of Australia. 2 Mar 2015.
  7. ↑ Dan Harrison (27 Apr 2015). "Transparency on drug company payments and trips for doctors a step closer". Sydney Morning Herald.
  8. ↑ Ed Silverman (29 Apr 2015). "What Meals? Pharma Will not Disclose all Payments to Docs Down Under". Wall Street Journal Pharmalot Blog.
  9. ↑ Ken Harvey (2 July 2010). "Position Paper and Consultation on the Promotion and Advertising Arrangements of Therapeutic Goods in Australia: A Response" (PDF). Submission to Therapeutic Goods Administration.
  10. ↑ Ken Harvey (25 July 2013). "Ken Harvey: Advertising battleground". Medical Journal of Australia.
  11. ↑ "Health supplement Acacia rigidula may contain synthetic amphetamines". The Sydney Morning Herald. 15 Apr 2015.
  12. ↑ "ACCC targets alleged false and misleading Nurofen claims". Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. 5 March 2015.
  13. ↑ Ken Harvey (10 Aug 2012). "TGA failure gives Nurofen consumers a headache". The Conversation.
  14. ↑ "ACCC granted injunction against director of weight loss company". Sydney Morning Herald. 18 Aug 2011.
  15. ↑ "Backlash over decision by Australia's top medical journal to outsource to company with history of 'unethical' behaviour". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 1 May 2015.
  16. ↑ "Medical journal editor sacked and editorial committee resigns". Sydney Morning Herald. 4 May 2015.

External links

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