Peep peep.

May 15th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, whistleblowers | 20 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 15 May 2010

It’s worth paying attention to medicine, because when it goes wrong, people suffer and die. But how do we know when things are going wrong? This week the BMA produced a report on whistleblowers. Of the 384 doctors they surveyed (with a dismal response rate of 12%, we should be clear): 40% said they would be too frightened of repercussions to report concerns about patient safety. Of those who had spoken out on an issue, one in ten were told this could have a negative impact on their careers. But are they being melodramatic? And what if life for whistleblowers was better?

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Doing nothing

March 19th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, competing interests, conflict of interest, doing nothing, evidence | 52 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 March 2010

I don’t write about stories where someone has a conflict of interest, in general, because there are no interesting scientific ideas in them: such stories are a way for people who don’t understand the technicalities of science to give the illusion of critiquing it. But it’s still disappointing to see companies being so much better at getting media coverage for their ideas than everyday folk. Read the rest of this entry »

Obvious quacks: the tip of a scary medical iceberg

February 26th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in adverts, alternative medicine, bad science, big pharma, evidence, regulating research | 120 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 27 February, 2010

After the Science and Technology committee report this week, and the jaw dropping stupidity of “we bring you both sides” in the media coverage afterwards, you are bored of homeopathy. So am I, but it gives a very simple window into the wider disasters in all of medicine. Read the rest of this entry »

The year in nonsense

December 19th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in annual roundup, bad science, big pharma | 24 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 19 December 2009

It’s been a vintage year for dodgy science in government. We saw reports on cocaine that were disappeared, dodgy evidence to justify DNA retention, and some government advisors who estimated the cost of piracy at 10% of GDP, to media applause, and then failed to tell everyone they’d got the figure wrong by 1000%.

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By me in the BMJ: the dodginess of drug company trials

December 1st, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, hiding data, regulating research, statistics, subgroup analysis, systematic reviews, trial registers | 73 Comments »

Here’s a piece by me in the British Medical Journal this week, published online already, and in the print edition this Friday. It’s a head to head with Vincent Lawton, who until recently was head of Merck in the UK. Briefly, I set out the quantitative evidence demonstrating the scale of the problem, and he says: “oh, we’ve fixed everything now, and anyway some academic trials are dodgy too, here’s one what I found”. That’s a paraphrase, you can read his response for free on the BMJ website here, since they’ve decided that this is an important issue which deserves open access. If you’ve got something really clever to say about these pieces then you might also want to comment in the “Rabid Response” section of the BMJ version of either article.

We were going to have a debate on the Today programme on Monday morning, and then tomorrow morning, but unfortunately it’s been ditched. If you work in mainstream media and would like to cover this issue I’m always keen, and amazingly easy to get hold of, ben@badscience.net. Although I realise that your idea of a meaningful critique of the crimes of big pharma is “chemotherapy hurt my grandma that’s why I love vitamin pills and hate teh vaxxines lol freedom”. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, that was quick

November 21st, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, regulating research | 60 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, Saturday 21 November 2009, The Guardian

Once your medicines regulator decides it should change the side effects warnings on the patient information of a drug taken by millions of people, how long do you think it would take for that change to be implemented?

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And now, nerd news

October 3rd, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, hiding data, regulating research, systematic reviews, trial registers, vaccines | 34 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, Saturday 3 October 2009, The Guardian.

There are some very obvious problems that never seem to go away. Right now I can see 1,592 articles on Google News about one poor girl who died unexpectedly after receiving the cervical vaccine, and only 363 explaining that the post mortem found a massive and previously undiagnosed tumour in her chest. Meanwhile the Daily Mail this week continue their oncological ontology project with the magnificent headline: “Daily dose of housework could cut risk of breast cancer”.

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Please give us all your money

September 5th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in africa, aids, bad science, big pharma, patents | 90 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, 5 September 2009, The Guardian

How do patents affect science? This week in India, US drug company Gilead lost their appeal to stop local companies making cheap copies of their Aids drug Tenofovir. They are not alone: in 2007 Novartis lost a lengthy case trying to force the Indian government into strengthening their weak patent laws. India remains the free pharmacy of the world.

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How myths are made

August 8th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, ghostwriters, publication bias, references, structured data, systematic reviews | 40 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, Saturday 8 August 2009, The Guardian.

Much of what we cover in this column revolves around the idea of a “systematic review”, where the literature is surveyed methodically, following a predetermined protocol, to find all the evidence on a given question. As we saw last week, for example, the Soil Association would rather have the freedom to selectively reference only research which supports their case, rather than the totality of the evidence.

Two disturbing news stories demonstrate how this rejection of best practice can also cut to the core of academia.

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Elsevier get into fanzines

May 8th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in academic publishing, bad science, big pharma, ghostwriters | 35 Comments »

Ben Goldacre

The Guardian

Saturday 8 May 2009

In Australia a fascinating court case has been playing out around some people who had heart attacks after taking the Merck drug Vioxx. This medication turned out to increase the risk of heart attacks in people taking it, although that finding was arguably buried in their research, and Merck have paid out more than £2bn to 44,000 people in America, although they deny any fault. British users of the drug have had their application for legal aid rejected, incidentally: health minister Ivan Lewis promised to help them, but FOI documents obtained by The Guardian last week showed that within hours, Merck launched an expensive lobbying effort that convinced him to back off.

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