Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre

Howdy reader,

I have just finished reading this book. And it is a cracking, stimulating, depressing and also funny book. Ben Goldacre tackles big pharma, vitamin pill manufacturers (I had no idea how huge this industry is), MMR and MRSA controversies, anti-oxidant truths and a whole plethora of misinformation we are fed by journalists in search of the big headline. All written in a very friendly, readable style.

He explains how research should work and gives the reader the lowdown on thinking in terms of evidence based medicine. He explains how to recognise when a 'sciencey' newspaper article really is just bullshit. And it really does make you view these articles in a totally new (and unfortunately cynical) light. I say cynical because the quality of science journalism since reading this book really does seem to be of a desperately low standard.

Many of the examples he uses are funny, but I actually found it depressing to see how successful big pharma/the multibillion dollar vitamin pill industry/journalists are in manipulating research data to sell their drugs/pills/newspapers.

So this really is a marvellously interesting read. Fair play to him for his efforts in debunking these news stories and explaining to us how we can debunk them ourselves in the future.

So I highly recommend this to you. Go for it.

Cheers,
Jim.

p.s. The Bad Science web site is always worth a read.