Cherry picking is bad. At least warn us when you do it.

September 29th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, academic publishing, aric sigman, schools, systematic reviews | 9 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 September 2011

Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. “Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health,” explained the Mail.

These news stories were based on a scientific paper by Sigman in The Biologist. It misrepresents individual studies, as Professor Dorothy Bishop demonstrated almost immediately, and it cherry-picks the scientific literature, selectively referencing only the studies that support Sigman’s view. Normally this charge of cherry-picking would take a column of effort to prove, but this time Sigman himself admits it, frankly, in a PDF posted on his own website. Read the rest of this entry »

Cherry Picking and the Professional Association of Teachers

June 20th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, electrosensitivity | 56 Comments »

It’s a small thing, but if Wi-Fi and reality editing interest you, then here is a quick letter I just pinged off. Before you accuse me of being a little too interested, I can write veeeery quickly, and this kind of phenomenon really does fascinate me. Read the rest of this entry »

My evidence to the Science and Tech Select Committee inquiry on missing trial data

April 26th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in alltrials campaign, bad science, big pharma | 6 Comments »

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee are currently looking at the problem of clinical trial results being withheld from doctors and patients (partly, the committee says, in response to Bad Pharma, which is heartening). A clear, thoughtful report and policy recommendations from this committee could be an important step towards fixing these problems.

I gave oral evidence this week on a panel with Roche, GSK, and the ABPI (who have previously tried to pretend that all the issues in Bad Pharma were “historic” and “long addressed”). I’ve posted the video below, and I’ve posted my written evidence underneath that. First is my submission addressing the specific questions posed by the Committee, and then my appendix, giving background on the problem of withheld trial results. Read the rest of this entry »

New edition of “Testing Treatments”, best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.

October 18th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in great popularisers of science, methods | 6 Comments »

People often ask if there’s one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly “Testing Treatments“. I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it’s just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full text as a PDF for free here, and there are translations in various languages for free on that page too. I recommend getting a paper copy (they’re lovely and it’s very readable) here, there’s a proper Kindle edition here, and the publisher page is here. Meanwhile a website version with extra resources is coming shortly.

I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity.  My foreword for the new edition is pasted below. Read the rest of this entry »

Give us the trial data

August 14th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, libel, publication bias, regulating research | 47 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010

This week the drug company AstraZeneca paid out £125m to settle a class action. Over 17,500 patients claim the company withheld information showing that schizophrenia drug quetiapine (tradename Seroquel) might cause diabetes. Why do companies pay out money before cases get to court?

Read the rest of this entry »

What would you say to people from the developing world who use science to make decisions, but don’t necessarily always have a lot of time, or know a lot about it?

May 16th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in africa, aids, bad science | 98 Comments »

I’ve been asked to facilitate a couple of sessions with some civil servant types from various countries in the developing world who advise their governments on science, and particularly on the science informing policy and purchasing decisions. The idea is to focus on how people might try and mislead you with science, and the range of scientific background and understanding in this group will be pretty wide, as it always is with civil servants. Since I’ve noticed a recurring theme for readers of this blog to be a bit cleverer than me (albeit less dogged and obsessive) I was hoping you might have some ideas about the kinds of areas to cover, the themes that are relevant, and the kind of structure to use. Read the rest of this entry »

How Aric Sigman distorts the scientific evidence to mislead you.

February 24th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in aric sigman, bad science, mail, onanism, references | 153 Comments »

I was on newsnight a second ago, debating the rather indulgent claims of Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield and Dr Aric Sigman about Facebook and Twitter. It’s 40 minutes in to the show, which can be seen here as a wmv/rm file or here on iPlayer or here:

I promised references. These can be found below. Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter 1024, in which my prejudices about journalists are rendered in quantitative form.

June 21st, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, media, media research | 19 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday June 21, 2008

The best thing about this job is you have an excuse to read the Daily Mail every day: but sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I worry that it might infect me. We are all biased by the information we expose ourselves to, through our friends, our reading, and our choices in life. I think science coverage is pretty poor, and a lot of it is plainly wrong. Am I biased by my work? Do I see only the bad, in a very literal sense? Like many before it, this is a problem which can only be cracked with an ingenious idea from 20,000BC called “counting” (quibblers are welcome, my date is from the notched “Ishango bone“).
Read the rest of this entry »

The end of homeopathy?

November 16th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, homeopathy | 476 Comments »

Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos. So why do so many sensible people swear by them? And why do homeopaths believe they are victims of a smear campaign? Ben Goldacre follows a trail of fudged statistics, bogus surveys and widespread self-deception.

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Friday November 16 2007

Read the rest of this entry »

MMR: the scare stories are back

July 18th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 23 Comments »

Here’s my piece from the British Medical Journal, or at least the last version I saw of it.

Medicine and the media
Ben Goldacre
doctor and writer, London,
Guardian and BMJ columnist
ben@badscience.net
DOI 10.1136/bmj.39280.447419.59
www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.39280.447419.59

A UK newspaper has once again linked autism with MMR and sparked a spate of media scaremongering. But the original story was wrong on every count, writes Ben Goldacre

It was Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries