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Manufacturer: Fourth Estate Ltd Written By: Ben Goldacre
Customer Rating: Summary: Frightening and compulsory read Comment: Best read I have had for a good few months.
I got hold of a copy of the book during Christmas and finished it within 3 days. Coming from a science background, I can only say that I cannot treat the misinformation, manipulation and exploitation by the media and pharmcueticals described by Dr. Goldacre as 'light-hearted science'. Some of those things he mentioned regarding statistical methods and reporting are common problems for any science research, albeit not always used by companies to seek profits. It throws me into despair.
I recommend this book to anyone, especially to those who are supposed to promote public understanding of science - there are so much they could have done and yet haven't. Customer Rating: Summary: the appliance of science Comment: Following on from his Guardian column of the same name Ben Goldacre, a doctor and journalist, has published Bad Science, where he attempts to engage us in the science that we are all subjected to and persuaded by on an almost daily basis. He is not a happy man. Not so much because people get things wrong, or portray them inaccurately but because the science behind it isn't really that complex. In fact the revelation of this book is not so much that he lays into some soft targets like Gillian McKeith ('or, to give her full medical title: Gillian McKeith') or homeopathy, giving us all a giggle along the way, but that he attempts to arm us all with the basic scientific tools that will help us to smell a rat. After all, most of what we get now in the press and on the television is statistics and we all know that there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.
When I was about 13 at school I once convinced my class that red apples could give you cancer. Having learnt the word 'carcinogenic' I was able to use that a few times along with pigment and sound terribly convincing even though every word was absolute nonsense. It turns out that my skills would also have qualified me to be an excellent nutritionist (a title which after all requires no actual qualifications). McKeith is taken to task here for portraying herself as a bonafide medical authority, making very sciencey sounding statements and peppering her books with sciencey looking reference numbers, underneath which there are some fairly glaring and basic scientific errors. Some digging behind her credentials makes things a little clearer. All of which is grist to the mill for someone like me who has always had a dislike of her and her humiliation tactics. If you want some ammunition against 'the awful poo lady' then look no further.
I have also had a personal experience of homeopathy (before I really understood what it all was). I had a touch of the man-flu, was given a pill and told to go to bed with my clothes on, pull the duvet over my head and sweat it out (the pill would aid this by opening the capillaries and aiding blood flow right to the skin's surface). When I woke in the morning after a hot night I felt fine, great in fact and put it all down to the pill. This is the beauty of the placebo. If you believe in the pill, it might just do the trick (which is a gross simplification of the cultural significance of the placebo - explained in much greater detail by Goldacre). It is the fact that the placebo is so interesting a phenomenon, worthy of attention and study, rather than the new-agey sounding nonsense about the 'memory' of water explaining how a substance which has been so diluted as to contain not one molecule of the original substance could have any medical benefit (beyond that of the placebo), which really gets his goat. If homeopathy was to come clean and present itself as a benign resource like horoscopes and crystal dowsing then it might just get away with it but when you read about someone like Peter Chapell, a homeopath who has developed a remedy that can be used to treat the HIV virus, or Matthias Rath who claimed his vitamin treatments could do the same (and who recently dropped his libel case against The Guardian), it makes me think very dark thoughts.
I was really interested to read this book because of the final chapter on the MMR vaccine. Being a young parent means that you are literally bombarded with information, advice, statistics, theories and good old-fashioned fearful paranoia and I'll admit that my steadfast rational approach to just about everything had encountered a little wavering when it came to making a decision that could impact on someone else's life. Goldacre doesn't exactly come out and say it but by calling the chapter The Media's MMR Hoax and showing that after several years of scare-mongering there is no evidence to support a link between the jab and autism, he helped put the issue to bed for me.
The role of the media is a large focus of the book unsurprisingly and it is almost gobsmacking to see how poorly researched, written and constructed some of the stories we have all read really are. The fact that the results which fuelled the MRSA superbug stories came from a poorly qualified man, out of depth and working out of his garden shed would be funny if it weren't so serious (especially given his untimely death from a car accident shortly after the facts of the matter were exposed). The pressure on journalists to provide stories with punchy headlines and stats that have impact leads to a fudging of the numbers, very basic and very misleading mistakes. The pressure on papers to maintain advertising revenue means that articles which should really be written by science correspondents are given to lifestyle or comment writers who don't use the science writers at their disposal to check the science. That's why it might be worth checking out the Bad Science website next time you read that cocaine use amongst schoolchildren has doubled or that you should be drinking gallons of purple grape juice due to its high level of antioxidants.
Science can be complex, but bad science is often pretty simple. Goldacre's book is eye-opening and provocative whilst always attempting to be fair rather than personally vindictive (well, he almost pulls that one off). It could have been better ordered, powered as it is by the digressive and slightly chaotic energy of a self-confessed geek but what's refreshing is that he credits his readers with some intelligence and places the ball firmly in our court. Customer Rating: Summary: One of the best books I've read for a whole Comment: I found this book interesting, informative and a little scary. Ben Goldacre's calm, patient list of the crimes against science and by extension humanity perpetuated by the alternative medicine and pharmacological industries, as well as the media's own aptitude for distorting the view of science in the popular eye, is a gripping, sometimes funny, often terrifying read. Strongly recommend this book. Customer Rating: Summary: Very important antidote to media science scare mongering... Comment: This book (even with its somewhat over the top style) is extremely important, and should be given to all the people you know. It demonstrates very well how much of the science that we glean through our newspapers is at best simply wrong and at worst a gross distortion of the facts (OK, lies). [Real] Dr. Goldacre's book ranges from the MRSA and MMR "scandals" (which on closer inspection appear to be nothing of the sort), through the dubious (and to some extent, hilarious) PR methods of the nutritionists and purveyors of wrinkle creams, to the wacky new age worlds of homeopathy and ear candles.
It is also an important book for scientists (of which I am one), to remind us of the traps of false positives and dodgy statistics, into which we are occasionally tempted due to shortage of time (or even, heaven forbid, laziness).
The main picture coming out of this book is of sadly ignorant journalists printing the ludicrously unchecked ramblings of a variety of "scientists" whose degrees were downloaded from the Internet (or in one case, awarded by a spoof institution set up by the scientist in question).
Reading the book will also give the layman the ability to sense check the tabloid scare stories - if only this were a standard text in schools... but we can only dream. Customer Rating: Summary: Brilliant account of bad medicine Comment: Ben Goldacre is a doctor who writes a weekly column in the Guardian exposing bad medicine. He writes, "The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London's Science Museum."
He attacks the idea that social and political problems can be solved by pills, even Patrick Holford's Optimal Nutrition pills, or those of the TV 'nutritionist' Gillian McKeith, with her PhD from a non-accredited correspondence course 'college' in the USA. Their advice is just 'a manifesto of right-wing individualism', blaming people's ill-health on their food choices, not on the social inequality that drives health inequality.
Dr Goldacre writes, "All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people."
He praises the brilliant Cochrane reviews of medical literature. He notes that to say that giving placebos in trials of treatments is unethical is to assume that the treatment is better, which is to assume what is being tested. We don't know the result of the trial before we do it - that is why we do trials.
For example, trials have proven that the painkiller Vioxx caused 80,000-139,000 heart attacks, a third probably fatal, during its five years on the market. Trials have also discredited antioxidants, hormone replacement therapy and calcium supplements.
Dr Goldacre notes that anti-arrhythmia drugs when given to all heart attack patients, not just to those with arrhythmic heartbeats, increased their risk of dying. He reminds us that Benjamin Spock's well-meant but wrong advice - that babies should sleep on their tummies - led to tens of thousands of cot deaths. What counts is the effect, not the intent.
He recounts the media's disgraceful nine-year campaign against the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine. The campaign caused an epidemic of mumps, with 5,000 cases in January 2005, and 2008 saw the highest number of measles cases since 1995. Nearly half of all homoeopaths irresponsibly advised against taking the vaccine, as did almost a fifth of chiropractors. Only a few homeopaths and just a quarter of the chiropractors acted professionally and recommended it.
