I’ve just moved servers, so the list of forum topics has temporarily disappeared from the right hand column, but the most excellent BadScience discussion forums are alive and kicking, with lots of new BS candidates and the usual mix of elevating banter and tortuous pedantry. 427 registered users, 8877 posts, and counting…

www.badscience.net/forum/

Okay not mine, because I’ve got a bit over-ambitious with the content, but this is a bit of a find: free books by one of the early pioneers of popularising critical appraisal, epidemiologist Petr Skrabanek. Few today will remember his fantastic “Follies and Fallacies in Medicine” (co-authored with GP James McCormick) in which they take on everything from the bad maths of breast cancer screening, through the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, and on to homeopathy and “electroquackupuncture devices”. Their “Fistful of Fallacies” is particularly good.

At the time, this was regarded as a visionary classic, a book that changed the Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

“Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.” Even from looking at the title, you just know this academic paper, from the September edition of the International Journal of Evidence-based Healthcare, is going to be a corker. And it uses the word “fascist” (or elaborate derivatives) 28 times in 6 pages, which even Rik Mayall in the Young Ones might have described as “overdoing it”.

Now obviously post modernist intellectuals are about a thousand times more intelligent than me - because I only know about science and computers - but I found this paper so confusing I thought it might be a spoof. After all, who could forget the great Sokal hoax, where Read the rest of this entry »

Not bad science but there’s a great story in the Mail on Sunday about Prof Don Kurtz and his recordings from space: he’s changed the speed to get the frequencies into the audible Read the rest of this entry »

Hands up, it’s a pretty cheap shot, but nevertheless I thought you might enjoy this bit of amateur epidemiology from some Christians who’ve looked at cause of death and early mortality in “rock stars”, and then done some Read the rest of this entry »

Swimming through piles of references this afternoon I stumbled upon this golden gasser from yesteryear, Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Saturday August 12, 2006
The Guardian

Look, I feel sorry for the six men who swelled up “like the Elephant Man” on TGN1412. The interim report is out now, and it has a lot of sensible suggestions about the mechanics of that kind of trial, but it got me thinking: if you wanted to be actuarial about this, and count up the pain and death caused by research shortcomings, where would you find the most tragedy? Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you might enjoy this absolute cracker from the current edition of the International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare: a critical theory deconstructionist attack on evidence based medicine and Cochrane centres, in a proper journal. Presumably I am a bit of a “microfascist” for posting it here.

Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism

Background
Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons why people are so scared of science these days is that technology has become more inexplicable, and somehow more “black box”. Fifty years ago, with a bit of practise and a good grounding in school science, you could fix your car and understand how your radio works. You wouldn’t stand a chance these days, but it was not ever thus: Japanese War Tubas, only a few decades ago, were the very pinnacle of Read the rest of this entry »

Taking it to the next level, this evil genius, deployed several hours of lab time on an NMR machine to find out the precise chemical composition of earwax. Read the rest of this entry »