Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010
For simpletons and amateurs, there are good research methods, and bad research methods. In reality, different tools are valuable in different situations, and sometimes, even very tiny numbers of people can give you a meaningful piece of information: even an anecdote can be informative. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 31 July 2010
It’s the near misses that really make you want to shoot your own face off. This week the Centre for Policy Studies has published a pamphlet on education which has been covered by the Mirror, the Mail, the BBC, the Telegraph, the Express, the Guardian, and more. Boris Johnson endorses it.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
There is a pleasing symmetry in the ropey science you get from different players. When GlaxoSmithKline are confronted with an unflattering meta-analysis summarising the results of all 56 trials on one of their treatments, as we saw last week, their defense is to point at 7 positive trials, exactly as a homeopath would do. Politicians will often find a ray of positive sunshine in a failed policy’s appraisal, and promote that to the sky. Newspapers, similarly, will spin science to fit their political agenda, with surreal consequences (the Telegraph have claimed recently that shopping causes infertility in men, and the Daily Mail reckon housework prevents breast cancer in women).
But does the same thing happen in formal academic research?
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 April 2010
What can science and evidence bring to an election? First there are the micro-issues: we can assess the validity of claims made by politicians by seeking out the evidence. David Cameron, for example, claimed that UK cancer services were bad because fewer people die of cancer in Bulgaria than in the UK, which many have already debunked: he used death data from a country with inferior monitoring standards, and a far lower life expectancy, but more than that, he used death data, which is driven not just by treatment success, but also by the number of new cases to start with, which can vary widely for all kinds of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 27 March 2010
After the Mail’s definitive headline of last year “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer” (in the same week as a story about a radioactive paedophile, no less) comes a competitor. “Facebook spreads syphilis” was the front page headline in the Sun on Wednesday: “sex diseases soaring due to facebook romps”. The Mail was quick to follow, with “Facebook ‘sex encounters’ linked to rise in syphilis”, while the Telegraph had “Facebook ‘linked to rise in syphilis’: Facebook has been linked to a resurgence in the sexually-transmitted disease syphilis, according to health experts.” It even made the Star.
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 »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2010
“2,000 bugs taking a ride in every train compartment” said the Daily Mail. “Cockroaches cluster on trains“, scuttled the Telegraph. “Commuters share trains with 1,000 cockroaches, 200 bedbugs and 200 fleas” said the Evening Standard. The figures were all very specific and very frightening.
“Rentokil say they also discovered that a bus was home to 500 cockroaches, along with dozens of fleas and bedbugs,” explained the Standard. Those disgusting trains are even worse. “Research by pest controllers Rentokil shows that, on average, a single train compartment houses a staggering 1,000 cockroaches, 200 bed bugs, 200 fleas, 500 dust mites and 100 carpet beetles,” said the Mail. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the report, press release below. It looks like pretty sensible stuff to me, homeopaths can’t expect special treatment among all forms of medicine, if the evidence actively shows it doesn’t work, then that’s that. I have to say what really frightens me about all this is the MHRA: if regulation is so political that they can fall into holes over sugar pills, it tells a frightening story about their wider activities. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 16 January 2010
Every now and then you have to salute a genius. Both the Daily Mail and the Metro report new research analysing the positions of Britain’s ancient sites, and the results are startling: primitive man had his own form of “sat nav”. Researcher Tom Brooks analysed 1,500 prehistoric monuments, and found them all to be on a grid of isosceles triangles, each pointing to the next site, allowing our ancestors to travel between settlements with pinpoint accuracy. The papers even carried an example of his map work, which I have reproduced here.
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%.
