Big Pharma and Breast Cancer with Sharon Batt

 In Cancer

Big Pharma and Breast Cancer with Sharon Batt » Listen

Date: October 30, 2017

Episode Description

After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, Sharon Batt realized that the politics of breast cancer are rarely explored.  In her book “Health Advocacy Inc.”, she draws links between the pharmaceutical industry, and the corporate financing that is threatening public health care.  This is a riveting interview for any woman with breast cancer, and the women and men that know them.

Dr. Risk’s Thoughts

My experience with political dramas lays mostly in the world of Chronic Lyme Disease and its subsequent denial.  But when I talk to people like Sharon Batt, I realize that this is a wide spread phenomenon that is part of being human.  Her book discusses the politics of breast cancer, and the relationship with the pharmaceutical companies.

Guest Information

Sharon Batt, PhD, is an award-winning journalist and a former editor of the consumer education magazine Protect Yourself. Following a breast cancer diagnosis in 1988, she co-founded Canada’s first breast cancer advocacy group, Breast Cancer Action Quebec, and wrote the book, Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer. After a decade of activism, Sharon moved to the scholarly research community in Halifax where she began to research health movements. Drawing on her insider experience as a patient and activist, on archival material, and on interviews with leaders in the breast cancer movement, she examined the growing phenomenon of partnerships between “big pharma” and patient advocacy organizations. The result is a new book, Health Advocacy Inc., which documents how pharmaceutical industry funding fractured Canada’s breast cancer movement, compromising its democratic ideals. She is now an independent scholar and adjunct professor in Dalhousie University’s Department of Bioethics.

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