Dr Ben Goldacre works full-time for the NHS, as well as contributing a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper, and maintaining a blog also titled “Bad Science”. He is dedicated to debunking popular distortions about science, dismantling inadequate science reporting in the mainstream media and presenting the strong, evidence-based scientific method as the true value of science in the popular mindset. Bad Science was published in 2008 and falls firmly into the “popular science” genre, not because it’s a cheap, lowest-common-denominator treatment of science, but because it aims to demystify and educate the lay reader into what science is, how it works, and how so many of the stories and ideas you may have heard about science in the media are, simply, nonsense. Goldacre writes clearly and with humour, walking the reader through basic scientific concepts like double-blinding, randomisation, the placebo effect (more complex and wide-ranging than one might imagine), regression to the mean, and so on. He interweaves this “good science” with commentary upon those who cynically – or naively – bend this methodology and hawk their quackery to the public. First to come under Goldacre’s good-humoured fire is the detox industry, based as it is on no science at all. Homeopathy, too, gets a good drubbing from Goldacre, and while the ridiculousness of homeopathy is well-established and may seem like an easy target, Goldacre is at pains to point out that these industries, damaging as they may be, are simply – if I may borrow medical terminology myself – symptoms of a wider malaise. Indeed, throughout the book, he points out time and again that it is not individuals he is interested in, but institutions. For Ben Goldacre, the problems with bad science are always systemic. He dedicates several chapters to self-styled “nutrionists”, exposes their charlatanry, reserving particular ire for their most vocal proponent, Scottish turd-feeler “Dr” Gillian McKeith, who claims a PhD which Goldacre was also able to purchase off the internet for his dead cat. Yet, he points out, the problem is not with McKeith per se, so much as with a popular media and culture which buys into their methodologies, not stopping to examine critically or to hold up to scientific scrutiny, because the quick-fix, cheap-pill solutions seem so much more appealing than the dry, statistical world of actual scientific endeavour.
All of which is good fun, but things become more serious in the second half of the book, where Goldacre moves away from debunking quacks to some of the genuinely dangerous effects of bad science – of particular note is a chapter dedicated to Matthias Rath, a man who has been selling multi-vitamins in South Africa to the public and to the government as a way of treating AIDS (despite a comprehensive lack of compelling evidence that this will do any good), whilst decrying the use of retro-viral drugs (the best current treatment for AIDS). One shudders to think how many deaths and HIV-infected children this man has been responsible for. The “alternative medicine” community, by the way, far from condemning Rath, has routinely championed him as a vocal proponent of “alternative paradigms” to the apparently hegemonic, tyrannical rule of Western medicine.
Goldacre builds ultimately – through analyses of statistics, a somewhat difficult chapter for this non-mathematically inclined reader – to a dissection of what he terms the “prototypical health scare, by which all others must be judged and understood. It has every ingredient, every canard, every sleight of hand, and every aspect of venal incompetence and hysteria, systemic and individual” – he is referring, of course, to the famous and seemingly interminable MMR/autism scare, prompted by Andrew Wakefield’s paper in the Lancet. The story is dissected and the media held to account here, for scaremongering, ignoring scientific evidence, falling prey to emotivism and simply failing to understand how science operates and what it is.
Although I didn’t agree with everything Goldacre says in this book (as a teacher, I am now simply bored of the tedious assertion that “exams are getting easier” – here stated without any corresponding evidence, which is familiar but disappointing from a man who spends the entire book ramming home the notion of how crucial evidence-based conclusions are; and his somewhat smug attitude towards “humanities graduates” made me roll my eyes more than anything else), it is a wonderfully accessible and important book, a crash-course in scientific reasoning, an impassioned defence of evidence-based medicine, and a coruscating attack on the media and the thoughtless chattering classes of dinner-party-throwing Islington. Get rid of those detox pills. Cancel that appointment with the homeopath. Burn that Gillian McKeith nutrition guide. Vaccinate your children. Because the evidence is there.
