Leemon McHenry

Leemon McHenry is a bioethicist and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge, in the United States.

He has taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Old Dominion University, Davidson College, Central Michigan University, Wittenberg University and Loyola Marymount University, and has held visiting research positions at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in the University of Edinburgh.

His research interests center on medical ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

McHenry received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where he was Vans Dunlop Scholar in Logic and Metaphysics supervised by Professor Timothy L. S. Sprigge.

He defended the thesis Experience and relations in the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead and F.H. Bradley, in `1984 by external examiner, Professor Dorothy Emmet, Cambridge University.

Much of McHenry's philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and process studies.

He has devoted attention to Whitehead's attempt to construct a unified general theory from the revolutionary developments in modern physics.

McHenry has argued that Whitehead's event ontology is a more adequate basis for achieving this unification than a traditional substance metaphysics.

His papers on this subject and a book, The Event Universe, investigate the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field and Einstein's special theory of relativity on the ontology of events.

In this manner he has defended the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

His main influences include: Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, W. V. Quine, Karl Popper, Nicholas Maxwell and Timothy Sprigge.

In medical ethics he has focused attention on scientific integrity in clinical research.

He has criticized the corporate takeover of medicine and the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medicine.

This includes dubious claims about chemical imbalance as a marketing ploy for selling antidepressants, direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, industry-sponsored clinical research, and ghostwriting for medical journals.

As an example of the latter, he has written articles about GlaxoSmithKline's study 329 on paroxetine and demanded that the ghostwritten article about the trial results should be retracted by the journal that published it in 2001.

In a broader realm, he has argued that the industry-academic partnerships have worsened university research, created increased opportunities for scientific misconduct, and failed to protect academic freedom.

This work falls within a new area of inquiry, agnotology, understood as the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit.

McHenry's work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, German, Croatian, and Polish.

In 2007 he became the literary executor to the late Professor Timothy Sprigge.

Commonwealth Club of California, The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine: Distorted Science in the Age of Big Pharma.

National Public Radio (NPR),The People's Pharmacy: The People's Perspective on Medicine.

Is Evidence Based Medicine an illusion?