The informative and witty expose of the "bad science" we are all subjected to, called "one of the essential reads of the year" by New Scientist.
We are obsessed with our health. And yet - from the media's "world-expert microbiologist" with a mail-order Ph.D. in his garden shed laboratory, and via multiple health scares and miracle cures - we are constantly bombarded with inaccurate, contradictory, and sometimes even misleading information. Until now. Ben Goldacre masterfully dismantles the questionable science behind some of the great drug trials, court cases, and missed opportunities of our time, but he also goes further: out of the bullshit, he shows us the fascinating story of how we know what we know, and gives us the tools to uncover bad science for ourselves. Preface
1. Matter
2. Brain Gym
3. The Progenium XY Complex
4. Homeopathy
5. The Placebo Effect
6. The Nonsense du Jour
7. Nutritionists
8. The Doctor Will Sue You Now
9. Is Mainstream Medicine Evil?
10. Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things
11. Bad Stats
12. The Media's MMR Hoax
And Another Thing
Notes
Further Reading and Acknowledgments
Index
1
MATTER
I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me-I would go so far as to say that it's my favorite leisure activity-and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands, or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes, and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people "science" is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.
Dismantling our early, more outrageous pseudoscientific claims is an excellent way to learn the basics of science, partly because science is largely about disproving theories, but also because the lack of scientific knowledge among miracle cure artistes, marketers, and journalists gives us some very simple ideas to test. Their knowledge of science is rudimentary, so as well as making basic errors of reasoning, they rely on notions like magnetism, oxygen, water, "energy," and toxins-ideas from high school-level science and all very much within the realm of kitchen chemistry.
DETOX AND THE THEATER OF GOO
Since you'll want your first experiment to be authentically messy, we'll start with detox. Detox footbaths have been promoted uncritically in some very embarrassing articles in the New York Daily News, the Telegraph, the Mirror,
