Bad Science



At the airport bookshop yesterday, I bought a copy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which I then devoured between Singapore and Vietnam, pausing to have dinner, and then finishing in the early hours of this morning when sleep wouldn’t come.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor who also wrote extensively for The Guardian, debunking various examples of quackery and also focussing on things like the MMR hoax. The book starts off with some fun, lighthearted stuff about detox remedies and footbaths that appear to soak bad things out of your feet, but don’t really do anything at all, and gradually becomes more serious as he examines homeopathy, bad medical trials, and culminating in utterly depressing things like the South African government’s opposition to retrovirals (which led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, because somebody thought orange juice would cure AIDS).

It’s also a good primer on many of the ways that statistics can be ignored or abused, on the placebo effect, on the risks of medicalising our general existence, and on the strange way that science is viewed by non-scientists as a mysterious and somehow arbitrary discipline, the dark side of Arthur C Clarke’s observation that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. By the end, I was so distraught with the manifest stupidities and cruelties of people (in particular, the people who thought that a high dose of vitamin C would be better than retrovirals) that I wanted to fling the book across the room in disgust.

I’m glad I didn’t, because it also gives one of the best explanations of why you should decide what your experiment is proving before you run it, rather than look for good results afterwards, and Fisher’s method for the combination of independent p-values, which is something that should have been used rather than accuse people of murder if two of their children die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

There are a few areas where one might be concerned. There’s some gender-specific terms (why would it be “the sharp scissors that only mummy can use” and not daddy’s?) but that feels like very minor nit-picking. Definitely worth a couple of hours of your time, however sad it might make you.

,

2 responses to “Bad Science”

  1. I watched the banned documentary Vaxxed, and I wouldn’t go near the MMR even if the government wanted to pay me. Whenever I see evidence that authorities and the media are covering up data (just like the tobacco industry did), there’s obviously a reason. Top CDC scientist whistleblower is the best we’re going to get, and yet the documentary is still condemned, probably because the pharmaceutical companies that control much of the media’s advertising budgets, have their own agenda – profit at all costs! We keep getting letters from our surgery reminding us to vaccinate Stanley, but they forget to mention that they get a little bonus ever time they stick a needle into a little child, so do they want to vaccinate us because it’s for our interest or their interest. If it was truly beneficial, then parents would pay doctors to have this service, not the other way round. I don’t see people too worried about getting their kids shots for flu or cold, which kill way more people than measles. It’s all a giant money-making scam – cradle to crave reliance on big pharma and men in white coats, rather than using your immune system, as nature intended. I got measles, so what!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.