Blame everyone but yourselves

July 25th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in alternative medicine, BANT, dangers, detox, media, nutritionists, regulating nonsense, telegraph | 55 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday July 26 2008

image Like many professions who kill people with some regularity, doctors have elaborate systems for seeing what went wrong afterwards, and the answer is rarely “Brian did it”. This week the papers have been alive with criticism for quack nutritionism after the case of Dawn Page, a 52 year old mother of two who ended up being treated on intensive care, with seizures brought on by sodium deficiency, and left with permanent brain damage, after following the advice of “nutritional therapist” Barbara Nash. She denies liability. Her insurers paid out £810,000.

I will now defend the nutritional therapist Barbara Nash. Read the rest of this entry »

You are hereby sentenced eternally to wander the newspapers, fruitlessly mocking nutriwoo

July 19th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, badscience, nutritionists, telegraph | 41 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday July 26 2008

The newspapers are so profoundly overrun with pseudoscience about food that there’s no point in documenting it any longer. They will continue with their Sisyphean task of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or cure cancer, and I will sit at the sidelines, making that joke over and over again.

This week, however, the Telegraph, which has lost its science editor and its science correspondent in two months, deserves special attention, because two of its food stories went beyond stupid, and managed to give actively harmful information. Read the rest of this entry »

Roger Coghill and the Aids test

June 28th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, competing interests, electrosensitivity, express, herbal remedies, Lucy Johnston, Lucy Johnston Express, magnets, PhDs, doctors, and qualifications, roger coghill, statistics | 72 Comments »

imageBen Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday June 28, 2008

It’s the big stories I enjoy the most. “Suicides linked to phone masts” roared the Sunday Express front-page headline this week. “The spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.”
Read the rest of this entry »

“Manufacturing Doubt”: Sir Cliff Richard weighs in on the Cochrane review.

April 26th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, manufacturing doubt, nutritionists, references, statistics | 36 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday April 26 2008

And so our ongoing project to learn about evidence through nonsense enters its sixth improbable year. This week, the assembled celebrity community and vitamin pill industry will walk us through the pitfalls of reading through a systematic review and meta-analysis from the Cochrane Collaboration, an international not for profit organisation set up 15 years ago to create transparent, systematic, unbiased reviews of the medical literature on everything from drugs, through surgery, to community interventions. Read the rest of this entry »

How policy works

April 12th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in badscience, laws, nutritionists | 32 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 12th April, 2008

If you put aside the fact that most of the people who campaign against food additives should be taken out and shot for crimes against the enlightenment, even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day, and the evidence overall genuinely shows that some food additives probably aren’t too Read the rest of this entry »

Now with audio – The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists Part II – BBC Radio 4

March 31st, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, fish oil, gillian mckeith, nutritionists, onanism, patrick holford | 41 Comments »

grundig_satellit_2000.jpgBusy bee today, sorry for the late link, the second part of the BBC Radio 4 two-part series “The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists” is going out at 8pm this evening, presented by yours truly (part one here) and produced by the excellently sharp Rami Tzabar from the BBC Radio Science Unit. I think it’s rather good, and makes a single clear point: lifestyle is important, and we all want to improve our health, but the evidence on diet and health is not sufficient to justify the very specific and confident advice which we crave, and which some will sell to Read the rest of this entry »

The trial that never was.

March 29th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, equazen, fish oil, mail, nutritionists | 50 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday March 29 2008

And so an epic saga comes to a close. You will remember the Durham Fish Oil tale – don’t switch off now, the punchline’s funny. The county council said it was doing a “trial” of fish oil pills in children, but the trial was designed so that it couldn’t possibly give useful information – not least because it had no placebo group – and was very likely to give a false positive result. Read the rest of this entry »

Radio 4 The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists

March 25th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, history of quackery, nutritionists | 31 Comments »

Well, very excitingly – to me – the first half of my two-parter on Radio 4 went out over the airwaves last night. You can listen to it here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Part 2 is here.

It’s Radio 4’s “Choice of the Day” for Monday Read the rest of this entry »

The Hadacol Boogie – Radio 4 Quack Show Listen Again…

March 24th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, history of quackery, nutritionists | 8 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Monday March 24 2008
[This is much longer than the Guardian version]

hadacol.jpgMaking a show for radio 4 on the history of diet fads [tonight Monday 24th at 8pm listen again here], I began to wonder what our modern gurus will come out with, when the cheques are all cashed, and the companies fold. Dudley J Le Blanc was a Louisiana senator in the 1940s, and the greatest quack ever to live. After a doctor cured his gout with a secret potion, Dudley stole a bottle, and copied the ingredients to make his own: Hadacol. “I had’da call it something”, he would later explain, once he had nothing to lose.

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Hadacol was made from Read the rest of this entry »

The stupid, it burns… now with added “Feynman Chaser”

March 22nd, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, homeopathy | 49 Comments »

No column this week, sorry about that, I forgot that Jesus died for our sins yesterday so I couldn’t give the company I was writing about a fair chance to respond. The story will pop up later as a bigger feature.

In the meantime, no matter how hard I try to be bored of quackery, the email inbox keeps defeating me. This video is beyond parody, and it would be a genuine crime to Read the rest of this entry »

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