Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre - a British epidemiologist - has done a lot of work on this area, but focused on the Pharmaceutical industry and their practices in running/publishing the results of drug trials. He's got a great blog at http://www.badscience.net/ and a book called Bad Pharma.

Yes, which, by itself, would not be a problem (of course, you would need to watch closely for conflicts of interest clouding the issue). No, the real problem is that the drug companies do not have to release all of the data associated with the trials they perform. They don't even have to publish all of the trials they perform. Given that, I have a very hard time trusting any drug that does not show amazingly stellar clinical trial results. If you have the options of cherry picking what you publish, and your drug only "helps" 50% of the participants, I see that as random noise. Ben Goldacre[1] is trying to shine a spotlight on this, and is doing a pretty good job. His Ted Talk[2] is well worth watching. 1. http://www.badscience.net/ 2. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science

> it explains how bad(For consumers) things happen due to systems not conspiracies That's one of the things I like most about Goldacre - he's very calm and measured compared to many people involved in these debates. To anyone that liked Bad Pharma: I can really recommend "Bad Science" as well, which is similar but broader. In particular it has some very interesting information about "alternative" medicine and its relationship to "big pharma". He also has a great blog: http://www.badscience.net/ and occasionally gives talks - do go, if you ever get a chance to hear him speak.

Agreed - they are fantastic books. His website is at: http://www.badscience.net/

This is a great book. Anyone from the UK will know Ben Goldacre from the Guardian where he writes a regular column exposing... well bad science. His Bad Science blog[1] will give you a flavour of his humour and style. [1] - http://www.badscience.net/

If you're interested in this blog post I suggest reading Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science - http://www.badscience.net/ It covers the problems with homoeopathy in great depth and includes other similar alternative medicines, along with flaws in scientific studies promoting them and quackery in general. I highly recommend reading it. Not just to learn about the problems with these kind of treatments, but also the difficulties in creating unbiased scientific tests.

EDIT -- In reference to The Blank Slate: I read it awhile back, and while there are some stretches in his usage of evolution to explain every form of behavior, e.g., people sat around fires for millenia therefore storytelling ability evolved, his explanations concerning adaptations for general survival utility are well supported. I would recommend reading it with a grain of salt, and take evolutionary psychology for what it is, with the same level of skepticism you would apply to get data from any social "science". EDIT--Some suggestive guideposts when reading in this field: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003817.html http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/papers/Controversies.pdf http://www.badscience.net/?p=518 Be on the lookout for handwaving, but certainly investigate. Don't make it the only book you read in this area...

Ben Goldacre's 'bad science' column in the guardian has been going after this for years. It's good, old fashioned campaigning journalism, and after five years might actually be having some effect. As he puts it: 'The very same person who tells your child that blood is pumped around the lungs and then the body by the heart, is also telling them that when they do The Energizer exercise then “this back and forward movement of the head increases the circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking”'.[http://www.badscience.net/?p=613] On the other hand, a glance at google shows how deep the problem goes: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22brain+gym%22+site%3Agov.uk

"you think X is easy?" is a pointless statement. Everything is easy or difficult to different extents to different people. Also, the difficulty of solving a problem is not the primary criterion for choosing whether to attempt or expect to solve the problem. More importantly, there are no excuses for unethical behavior and fraudulent research. I haven't read the book but I have read a lot of Ben Goldacre's articles (http://www.badscience.net/). His arguments are typically about how quacks, kooks, and pharmas practice 'bad' and fraudulent 'science' and are dishonest in presenting the results of their 'research'. A vast majority of the population is inept at understanding the kind of statistical language in which drug companies misrepresent results. In addition to innate human propensity for logical fallacies (e.g. Type 1 thinking- Kahneman, Tversky, etc.), our perception is tainted by the personal dimensions of issues related to health and suffering. Ben Goldacre is a darn good science 'popularizer' and does a great job of explaining these things to a general audience.

A great book RTCs is Ben Goldacre's Bad Science (http://www.badscience.net/) He points out that some of the first clinical trials recorded were in the bible. I couldn't find his quote, but I found an NEJM piece that references the same thing, although I think its in a nutrition debate. "The first published report of a clinical trial has biblical origins. In the Book of Daniel,5 reference is made to the unwillingness of the Israelite Daniel to accept the diet offered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. The king's official had put a steward in charge of Daniel and his three friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego):" "Daniel said to the steward . . . “Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's rich food be observed by you, and according to what you see deal with your servants.” So he hearkened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's rich food. So the steward took away their rich food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables." (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200301023480120)

I disagree. 95 good. 98 bad. 2000 good, XP bad (for me), Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 better but not great, 10 OK, 11 bad. As always: https://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/complicatedcover154.jpg ("I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." -- Ben Goldacre)

> 90% accuracy I found this article helpful to understand why 90% accurate isn't as good as it sounds: https://www.badscience.net/2009/02/datamining-would-be-lovely-if-it-wo… He goes I to more detail in his book, bad science with a more detailed explanation. It fools everyone because it is counterintuitive.

Ben Goldacre (of "Bad Science" fame) has been doing work in this area for a while: http://www.badscience.net/

I haven't read the article but Dr Ben Goldacre has written some great stuff on this. Incidentally he was the first person to get me engaged in science as a teenager, and I love his catchphrase: "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That". http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the-mighty-power-of-t… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Q3jZw4FGs

If you got curious about this, check Ben Goldacre's website (http://www.badscience.net/) and the OpenTrials project (http://opentrials.net/). He wrote a couple very interesting books about this issue.

What, like the pharmaceutical industry? I would argue that much good knowledge is created that way but it, too, has its issues. See much of Ben Goldacre's work. http://www.badscience.net/

Morons? Probably not. Ignorant? Definitely. A complimentary read on this topic: http://www.badscience.net/

> Don't get me wrong: funding bias is a problem, but it gets overstated. Hardly. It is in fact far worse than you are attempting to imply, and is covered in detail in Bad Pharma[1] which is well worth reading. A snippet: "Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments." [1] http://www.badscience.net/2012/09/heres-the-intro-to-my-new-book/

Some other good ones are http://www.badscience.net/ and http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html (I suppose both of those links are relevant versus the awfulness in this Atlantic article.)

We do know that there are elements of contagion around suicidality and self harm. People use the word "trigguring" (a bit problematic because the word has spread from and to other situations which have different levels of appropriateness) but yes, we are pretty sure that someone with anorexia who spends a lot of time talking to other people with anorexia, especially if they're actively sharing thinspo tips, is going to find recovery harder and that this is causal. While it's great that people with lots of data do research, and there are problems with ethics panels[1], we should be very careful with anything designed to manipulate emotions. [1] Ben Goldacre talks about this http://www.badscience.net/2011/03/when-ethics-committees-kill/

This article re-hashes much of the content of Ben Goldacre's book 'Bad Pharma', however it does not propose any solutions (Ben Goldacre does). There is plenty that can be done with legislation, as a customer of healthcare and in clinical trials. If all trials - good results or bad - were published then we would be half way there. http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-pharma/ The article mentions the company 'Amgen' and how they were not able to reproduce some earlier trial results. Alarm bells went off for me right there at the word 'Amgen'. They were the company that had the wonder drug EPO, as in of Lance Armstrong fame. That story is truly fascinating and best pieced together from the book 'Blood Medicine': http://www.bloodmedicine.info/ ...and from the cycling scandal books that have came out recently, e.g. Tyler Hamilton's.

His blog (http://www.badscience.net) is also very good and he writes for the Guardian.

Ben Goldacre has been pushing to fix this. See his campaign site: http://www.alltrials.net/ His blog/news site: http://www.badscience.net/ His Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_th…

His blog is a regularly enjoyable read on these issues: http://www.badscience.net/

Sadly no mention of Dr Ben Goldacre who has also been beating the drum in this area. Here is a good talk he did at TED (13 minutes): http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_th… He has a website at http://www.badscience.net He also wrote a book titled Bad Pharma. The Foreword contains me insight into just how drugs are tested http://www.badscience.net/2012/09/heres-the-intro-to-my-new-book/

Matthias Rath is a horrible piece of work. I recommend everyone to read the chapter of Bad Science that Matthias tried to have buried - http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/

http://www.badscience.net is Ben Goldacre's blog, and he publishes his Guardian articles there.

This isn't particularly new; here’s an article with more details from August 2008, from Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science: http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/ Also worth reading is Roald Dahl’s account of his eldest daughter’s measles infection at http://www.blacktriangle.org/blog/?p=715 .

>the fact that women are great judges of men I'm assuming that by great you mean better than men are of women. What evidence do you have for this, apart from the dubious[1] field of evolutionary psychology? Also, could you define your terms better? What aspects of men are women great at judging? They are, after all, not psychic. [1] http://www.badscience.net/category/evolutionary-psychology/

This the same BCA who sued a science journalist for pointing out that their claims didn't seem to have scientific proof. More at the excellent badscience blog: http://www.badscience.net/2010/04/british-chiropractic-association-dro…