Some talks in the US and Canada. COME!

January 30th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 2 Comments »

Bad Pharma is out in the US and Canada on 5th Feb, which is extremely good news (sorry about the delay, floods and hurricanes apparently..). I’ll be doing a few public lectures in various places, alongside media stuff and other things, there’s a list of open ones below.

If you’re a US podcaster or blogger and you want to chat about bad behaviour in the pharma industry then do please email the three of us (Brian.Gittis@fsgbooks.com ben@badscience.net zross@unitedagents.co.uk).

Also: in the UK I’ve done a gazillion talks, and the most fun things always come from random people. So if from the list below it looks like I’m passing through your town and you want me to do a talk in your university, a pub, or an event, or you think there’s someone I should meet, a campaigner, an academic, a journalist, then please contact jglover@randomhouse.com for Canada, and Brian.Gittis@fsgbooks.com for the US. Do also cc me, ben@badscience.net, and we’ll try to fit it in around the various bits of other work while I’m out there.

Cheers!

badpharmaUS

You can buy the US edition of Bad Pharma here.

PORTLAND, OR
Sun 17th Feb 7:30pm
Powell’s Bookstore, 1005 West Burnside.
Talk, Q&A, and signing
www.powells.com/locations/powells-city-of-books/

 

SEATTLE, WA
Mon 18th Feb 7:30pm
Town Hall, downstairs, enter on Seneca Street
Talk, Q&A, and signing:
townhallseattle.org/ben-goldacre-how-drug-companies-mislead-doctors-harm-patients/

 

NEW YORK CITY, NY
Thurs 21st Feb 7:00pm
Talk, Q&A, and signing
NYC Skeptics at University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street
nycskeptics.org/events/rationally-speaking-podcast-live-with-guest-ben-goldacre.html

 

TORONTO, CANADA
Friday, 15th Feb, 7:30pm
Massey College lecture, free and open to the public.
www.masseycollege.ca

Thursday 14th Feb, 6pm-8pm
Pub talk organised by @julia, free, open to all
www.supermarkettoronto.com/

 

AllTrials campaign launches, please sign and spread!

January 16th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in alltrials campaign, big pharma, publication bias | 2 Comments »

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a prominent campaign for access to all trial results, which we have launched this week at www.alltrials.net, with myself, Sense About Science, Sir Iain Chalmers from the James Lind Initiative (previously co-founder of Cochrane), Dr Fiona Godlee (Editor in Chief of the BMJ), and Dr Carl Heneghan (Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford).

The response so far, in a very short period of time, has been phenomenal. We have collected over 7,000 signatures already, simply from tweeting, and several extremely high profile organisations have signed up already, including: Read the rest of this entry »

Health Select Committee call on NICE, GMC, pharma industry to address missing data

January 16th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 4 Comments »

Excellent to see the UK House Of Commons Health Select Committee making such a clear statement about the ongoing problem of missing trial results, which the ABPI have laughably claimed is “historic“.

They call upon NICE, the GMC and the pharmaceutical industry to address the problem, and they also take a very strong clear position: that withholding the results of clinical trials should be neither legal nor ethical.   Read the rest of this entry »

I made this Radio 4 documentary on randomised trials on government policy

January 6th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, evidence based policy, government reports, podcast, politics | 4 Comments »

Here’s a documentary I made for BBC Radio 4 (with producer Rami Tzabar) about evidence based social policy, and why we should do more randomised trials in government. It’s good fun, 40 minutes, with contributions from Dean Karlan (who wrote this book and is behind all these excellent trials on reducing poverty), Prof Sheila Bird, Jonathan Portes from NIESR (his excellent blog here), the man they call GOD, and many more.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phhb9

It’s also Radio 4 documentary of the week (woo!) which means you can download it as an mp3. The link is live for another 5 days, and it works for some countries outside the UK too.

www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4choice

And now that it’s expired on iPlayer, you can listen to it on FigShare here:

figshare.com/articles/R4Doc_04_Jan_13_Ben_Goldacre/105918

If you’re interested in reading more evidence based policy, I highly recommend this Cabinet Office paper that I co-authored a few months ago, downloadable for free online. As explained here, it’s brief, and very much designed to be the Ladybird Book of RCTs in Government. If you want more on the uses for randomised trials in criminal justice, I wrote this in the British Medical Journal with Sheila Bird and John Strang in 2011 (sorry it’s not open access, I’ll try to fix that soon). More to come on this topic soon. Read the rest of this entry »