357 of 377 people found the following review helpful:
Thoroughly excellent
A thoroughly excellent book from a practising doctor and medical researcher, who is also one of the few science journalists to actually understand scientific method. He is nearly a lone voice in the media, exposing the astonishing journey of 'health news' from the pages of academic journals to the tabloids and broadsheets, without passing through a critical brain in...
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting
The bright red book caught my eye and before I knew it the purchase was complete. The debunking appealed to me as did the witty style of writing. There are periods of technical jargon and sometimes long winded explanations of trials which can be a touch boring. If, however the explaination of these trials wasn't complete the writer would be guilty of the same dumbing-down...
A thoroughly excellent book from a practising doctor and medical researcher, who is also one of the few science journalists to actually understand scientific method. He is nearly a lone voice in the media, exposing the astonishing journey of 'health news' from the pages of academic journals to the tabloids and broadsheets, without passing through a critical brain in between. Thus, on a daily basis, the papers produce "X CAUSES/CURES CANCER" stories, based on very shaky understanding of experiments done in a petri dish. Whilst these stories may give false hope or fear to thousands of people, which is bad enough, in the case of MMR, they actually caused harm. He also explains how and why science fails to explain itself clearly and loudly in the face of emotionally charged 'my son has autism due to MMR' stories.
Goldacre also lays bare the facts about such 'complementary' therapies such as Homeopathy and Nutritionism, which when stripped of the accolades given them in the media, are revealed to be little more than eccentric ideas which somehow have gained unquestioning credence in the popular mind, and even, perversely, created a deep-rooted suspicion of maninstream medicine which is now taken at face value.
I thoroughly recommend this book, especially for journalists, but it is also essential reading for scientists, doctors and anyone who finds their mouth flapping when trying to put their friends / family straight on why spending 100 quid on dipping their feet in water and watching it go brown is a spectacular waste of money.
Final thoughts - if this book demonstrates how bad science reporting is, what else is being reported badly that we should know about? Finance? Politics? Help!! Also, why is there no organisation with teeth that can bring people to account for irresponsible reporting? A free press is central to our world of course, but not a wild press, trampling all over everyone and everything without so much as a backward glance.
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Like the very best popular science, this book is patient but fascinating in building up your knowledge of the subject area - in this case medical (and 'alternative' medical) research. However, it goes beyond this in building up to a damning indictment of the media's handling of the MRSA and MMR scares, as part of their wider crimes against the public understanding of science.
In the hands of a polemecist such as Micheal Moore, these frauds perpetrated against the public would be described at a pitch of white hot rage (lkely with almost EVERY WORD IN CAPS). However Dr Goldacre describes the frankly horrifying details of these scares in patient and methodical detail, and is all the more compelling for it.
This book is compulsory reading. It should be forcefully inserted onto every reading list prepared by anyone, for anything.
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Ben Goldacre is a rare animal. He is a journalist who writes a column in the guardian but is also a full time GP working for the NHS. Apart from that he is young, smug, arrogant, has an ego the size of a planet and a writing style that is often condescending and patronising. Yet he is also witty, insightful and smart and has a turn of phrase that separates him as a great writer. Some of his more memorable quotes will stay with you and make you smile for a long time. Looking at the balance of positive and negative reviews here, there is about a 98% chance (118 five star reviews against 3 one star reviews) that like me you will find this book impossible to put down. On one occasion I read long into the night, forced myself about 3am to go to sleep and then when the alarm went off picked up the book and started where I had left off.
Despite its title however this is actually not a book about bad science. There is no botched physics, chemistry or biology in here. There are two main themes that run through the book. The first is an expose of pseudoscience - detox, vitamin supplements, homeopathy and the like. This includes some very cutting examinations of various charlatans who advocate these approaches. These things are very easy targets, but as they are not generally regarded as science in the first place, calling them `bad science' gives them an air of authority they don't deserve. The only science in the book in this context is the good evidence based medicine used very frequently by Goldacre to debunk the pseudoscientific rubbish. This is great stuff presented with true style. Of course you may be thinking that really these things don't matter. If somebody wants to spend £50 on a pointless course of vitamin C pills every year then it is up to them, and we can have a good laugh at their expense and everyone goes home happy. What Goldacre nicely reveals is that there is a much wider dimension to the problem. When people in the vitamin industry (who have grown rich on the `harmless' whims of westerners buying their daily doses of antioxidants) persuade governments in the developing world that the cure for AIDS is not anti-virals but vitamin supplements then thousands of people die as a result. Suddenly it isn't amusing or harmless any more.
If this first theme wasn't important enough, the second theme of the book is even more significant and that is the appalling standard of science reporting in the media. Goldacre blames this on the very poor level of science training among generalist reporters and editors. He suggests that because of this science stories in the mainstream media are always portrayed as breakthroughs, miracle cures or scare stories, instead of a detailed examination of their true complexity and importance. Science stories are often misrepresented, dumbed down and pitched at people with the intelligence of six year olds. This contrasts bleakly with coverage of say the financial news or literary examinations. Goldacre's coverage here is also not about bad science. It is how good science becomes badly mangled by the media machine. Even worse is when the media try to do their own science. His points are well made and arguments compelling. The concluding chapters on the MMR vaccine and MRSA superbug scares are well laid out examinations of the key issues.
Overall this is not just a great read but an important book. I'm glad it has made the Amazon top ten and the Sunday times bestsellers lists because lots of people need to be exposed to the messages it contains. My only concern is that most of the people buying it will be those already in the know - people like (in his words) doctors who have bought the book for a good laugh at homeopathy. If you are in this group then you should definitely buy it. If you are not, then buying it is even more important.
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I bought this book just four days ago, and have finished it already. It's a compelling, fast-paced read which presents all sorts of science--good and bad--in a clear, understandable way and which made me laugh out loud in places (not all of them appropriate).
I love it, my 13-year-old son is enjoying it, and I'm sure that my mother will like it too.
Overall a fantastic, readable, beautifully-researched and presented sciencey book.
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From previews on website Bad science, this is an essential read for those fed up of being told nonsense by the media about everything from health scares to cures for cancer.
Give it to your Daily Mail reading mother and vitamin pill popping sister for an early xmas present.
Amusing, and an easy read but a serious message.
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The point being, any reader of this eye-poppingly good book was once a mewling infant and a whole lot less accomplished. Growing up is one of the many reasons - other than fish-oil pills - why children in Durham and elsewhere improve over time. Growing up intellectually, it seems, is still on the to-do list of some of that city's council members. Ben Goldacre, or to give him his full medical title, Dr Ben Goldacre, has written a book that ought to be read by anyone in charge of public money, by any sentient adult who has bought a detox footbath in the deluded belief that detox is a meaningful concept, by any teacher putting their faith in the "Brain Gym", and by any "trendy MMR-dodging north-London middle-class humanities-graduate couple" who can argue with a straight face that just because vaccination has "almost eradicated polio... that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing".
Proper scientists be warned: you are entering "another universe of foolishness". The wry smile at the thought that people who have received a first-world education can still confuse oxidation and oxygenation will turn sour at the thought of privileged luminaries like Jeanette Winterson advocating treating "AIDS sufferers in Botswana... with homeopathy."
Homeopathy. Surprisingly, the "clearest teaching device for evidence-based medicine" - not by design, of course. As with all mumbo jumbo, any benefits are largely accidental. Goldacre exposes homeopathy for the bad science it is, and along the way we get to learn about trial design, false positives, the placebo effect, the power of pills, the marketing of health myths and the big and sometimes cynical business of the alternative medicine industry. It's a powerful strategy.
Nonscientists are too easily impressed by titles (witness the media success of Dr Gillian McKeith PhD, or to give her her full medical title, Gillian McKeith) and "sciencey-sounding explanations" used by quacks "to bolster their authority over the patient". This is ironic. True science does not respect this kind of authority. The Royal Society's motto is "Nullius in verba" - "On the word of no one" - which includes you, Holford, sloping around at the back of the class, with your cure-all "QLink pendant" and lawyer at the ready.
A simple test of whether someone is a genuine seeker of the truth or a self-appointed authority figure is how well they respond to their ideas being challenged. Do they welcome serious enquiry and engage you in frank and open conversation? Or fly off the handle at your impertinence? And Goldacre himself, should we trust him when he describes McKeith as "a menace to the public understanding of science"? Or should we trust the Soil Association, which "gave her a prize for educating the public"?
Goldacre is good at encouraging us to be as sceptical of the claims of "media nutritionists" as we are of the promises of politicians, at demystifying the scientific method, and showing how some of the most important ideas - of blinding and randomization in clinical trials, for example - are not difficult to understand. Most people can see that cherry-picking is unfair and that it's important to publish research so it's available for scrutiny. The public might even be impressed by the fact that meta-analysis "has saved the lives of more people than you will ever meet" if journalists spent less time infantilizing science.
Those who have a poor "understanding of the very nature of evidence" are not just readers of tabloid newspapers. Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the judge in the Sally Clark case, her defence teams, the appeal court judges, and almost all the journalists and legal commentators reporting on the case - all were duped by the ecological and prosecutor's fallacies. The price of their intellectual failure was not second place in a pub quiz but the jailing of an innocent woman. But what would you have decided if you had been on the jury? "Two babies in one family have died. This in itself is very rare. Once this rare event has occurred, the jury needs to weigh up two competing explanations for the babies' deaths: double SIDS or double murder." Far from double murder being many million times more likely than double SIDS, double SIDS is about twice as likely as double murder. Without having read Goldacre, I'm not sure I could have convincingly argued against the prosecution case. I might have been swayed to convict (the power of "social conformity"). The remarkable thing is that even these few pages are enough to give you a real handle on the problem, to make you "come out smarter" than all those highly paid professionals.
Clever people turn their backs on the scientific method as a "flawed paradigm" and so become vulnerable to "cognitive illusions". They "see patterns and connections in the world" where there are none and rely on "unfair tests" to back up their judgements. They don't see that it's the alternative therapists and not the scientists who wield "the authoritative and paternalistic reassurance of the Victorian doctor" and who "are championing a very old-fashioned... biological reductionism".
Goldacre may seem to have chosen a Sisyphean task for his spare time. But, while you "cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into", you can reason them into new positions. His achievement is to get the ball rolling, and to show the rest of us how we too can push against the forces of unreason. This is the Enlightenment at work: providing new explanations so that, over time, false beliefs become just spinning wheels.
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This book should be compulsory reading for any Journalist or Journalism Student, to point out to them how much damage their ignorance and bad reporting can do.
It is also a fantastic tool for the rest of us, to help navigate our way through all the "Bad Science" and plain and simple lies that fill our newspapers and news bulletins on a daily basis.
Ben addresses what is normally a very "heavy" subject in an engaging and very funny way, which enables you to understand the issues he is raising.
You may not be able to understand the finer points of nutritional science for instance, but he helps you to see why some of the results they are claiming are a load of rubbish.
He also explains why he ordered an online PhD for his dead cat when questioning "Dr" Gillian McKeith's credentials.
Ben also reveals some quite shocking (if you haven't heard them before) details of some of the biggest news stories of recent years.
A good example is the "World leading MRSA expert" who was working from his Garden shed near Northampton, while several newspapers still gave more weight to his evidence than the Microbiologists who had an actual Lab and knew how to use the equipment.
His approach isn't just to tell you why something is a sham, he invites you to question him and to test it out for yourself.
The "Detox Barbie" is a great example, he even suggests an experiment you can try for yourself using a Car battery charger, 2 iron nails and a willing volunteer Barbie.
(This is my kind of Science and he had me hooked after this!!)
Since finishing this book, I have actually found myself trying to read the real story behind the science headlines and actually understanding more, which I guess is the reaction Ben was hoping for.
Good work fella!
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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.
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The book focuses mainly on medical and health issues, and mounts a very effective attack on pseudoscience, dodgy research practices and the poor interpretation and reportage of research findings.
Its chapters concern the 'detox phenomenon', cosmetics, the 'brain gym, homeopathy, the 'placebo effect', dietary fads, the TV celebrity Gillian McKeith, fish-oil pills and educational performance, the nutritionist Patrick Holford, the pharmaceutical industry, the role played by the media, defective reasoning, bad statistics, health scares, and the 'media's MMR hoax'.
Much of the material was probably not initially collected for the purpose of writing a book, but it hangs together quite well around the common 'bad science' theme. The absence of an index is unfortunate, as has been noted in other reviews. However, the author is obviously clever, clear-thinking and well-motivated, and he has provided us with a critique of research practices which manages to be both educational and entertaining.
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I won't repeat all the praise given in other reviews. It's definitely an interesting book to read.
I am not British and do not live in the UK, so I was unaware of most of the issues (e.g. brain gym, MMR hoax) and "celebrity nutritionists" (Gillian McKeith, Patrick Holford) in the book. That wasn't a major issue since Ben Goldacre just took them as illustrative examples of a wider international phenomenon.
I compliment the author on his initiative. But as someone already familiar with the scientific method and statistics I found book a bit repetitive and tedious, which is why I won't give it 5 stars.
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