The year this column didn't always work better than a placebo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1980228,00.html
Ben Goldacre
Saturday December 30, 2006
The Guardian
"The funny thing is, now that I'm in a symbiotic relationship with the
***** industry, I'd be stuffed if they all went straight. Although
in 2006 there was no sign of it happening just yet. It was a
particularly good year for anyone wanting to make money shovelling
dodgy science into the innocent minds of young schoolchildren. The
ludicrously pseudoscientific "Brain Gym" programme is still being
peddled in hundreds if not thousands of state schools (although from
the ever joyful Bad Science postbag it sounds like Brain Gym "tutors"
are at least getting some good-quality heckling from science teachers
these days).
The Dore programme's expensive "cure" for dyslexia and the dismal
trial published on it in the journal Dyslexia eventually prompted five
resignations from that journal's editorial board (did I mention that
Dore partly funded the research?), and the epic story of the Durham
fish oil "trials" has reached as far as the comic Viz, which certainly
made my Christmas. Children of the nation, ignore your parents: it is
not necessary to take pills every day to lead a healthy life. There
will be something very special on the Durham fish oil "trials" in
2007, believe me.
Meanwhile, we caught Sky's flagship science show, Brainiac, red-handed
faking experiments, which was only funny because they make such a
melodramatic fuss about how incredibly daring they are for doing lots
of dangerous "experiments" "for real". It was testament to the geeky
readership of Bad Science that within a week of the story I'd been
sent videos of some guy in America casually doing, for real, in his
own back garden, the very stuff that Brainiac had been unable to do.
Even better was an instruction video for schoolteachers showing how to
do an experiment in class that Brainiac crowed was too dangerous to do
in class (and then faked anyway).
And what a great year for scares. The Times reported on its front page
that cocaine use among schoolchildren had doubled when it had done
nothing of the sort (they simply misinterpreted the report). The
media's anti-MMR campaign continued unabated as the Telegraph, Mail
and Times all reported on unpublished research claiming to show a link
between the vaccine and autism, even though the research was from a
man with a history of making such claims as far back as 2002, which he
still hasn't published. Over the year, at least two fully published
studies showing a negative result for almost the exact same experiment
were inexplicably ignored by all newspapers.
Similarly, large-scale published studies showing no link between
mercury fillings and health problems were ignored - yesterday's scare
perhaps - because fatigue, dizziness, headaches, aching joints and
more are now being blamed on wi-fi, mobile phones and "electromagnetic
hypersensitivity" instead (despite 31 published studies showing no
relationship). There was even a Tamiflu vaccine scare (although
Tamiflu's not a vaccine).
In the meantime every newspaper was filled with meaningless
corporate-sponsored "science" stories like Bravo TV's London School of
Economics "Evolution Report" (all men will have big willies) because
PR agencies know news editors are powerless to resist a silly science
story and the story will always run with the sponsoring company's name
attached. Ker-ching.
It's also been a great year for complementary medicine. Magical
magnetic bandages are available through the NHS Prescription Pricing
Authority, although they don't work better than a placebo, and the
MHRA, the healthcare regulator, has allowed herbal remedy and
homeopathy companies to make health claims on their packaging without
evidence for efficacy. I ranted about this on New Year's Eve 2005, but
then eight months later in August the great and the good in science
were queueing up with letters to everyone to say it was a disgrace
that these measures had been dumped on parliament in a hurry and
rushed through. Perhaps some people assume the stuff in this column is
so bad that I must just fabricate it.
Meanwhile, the nutritionism industry raked it in unabated, antioxidant
pills still didn't do anything for you, and the Daily Mail continued
sifting through every last inanimate object in the world to divine
whether it either causes, or cures, cancer. There were bonkers smoking
treatments, ludicrous cosmetics claims (mostly involving "oxygen"),
postmodernist drongos complaining that evidence-based medicine is
fascism, and one postmodernist drongo who acted like he'd done swanky
experiments on brain chemistry for his big Agatha Christie programme
on ITV when he very simply hadn't.
And somehow we managed to sneak rambling explanations of publication
bias, the need for clinical trial registers, medicalisation, the
viciously complicated "prosecutor's fallacy" in Sir Roy Meadow's "one
in 73m" courtroom statistic and a long and frankly very dreary
disquisition on the counterintuitive maths behind positive predictive
values in tests for rare events in relation to psychiatric violence on
to the news pages of a national newspaper. I should be paying you.
Next week, business as usual."
bad.science@guardian.co.uk
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