Ben Goldacre

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Ben Goldacre is a British medical doctor (a psychiatrist at an NHS hospital) who writes an excellent sceptical blog called Bad Science, which is also a regular column in The Guardian. He has a particular hate-on for medical frauds, homoeopathy and 'nutritionists'. His blog is top quality sceptical resource material and is highly recommended.

Contents

[edit] Bad Science

“ I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that… ”

Outside of his day job as a doctor, Goldacre commonly discusses (and dissects in detail in his book) the poor science behind homeopathy and other areas of so-called complementary and alternative medicine, prominent British nutritionists such as Patrick Holford and the (in Goldacre's words) 'awful poo lady', and, most commonly, the poor standard of science reporting in the media. There are certain examples of the media's distortion of science which Goldacre returns to very frequently; these include cancer scares,[1] 'formula' stories (which he has a large collection of),[2] and the MMR-vaccine-causes-autism scare, which was huge news in Britain for many years and frustrated Goldacre no end.[3]

[edit] Matthias Rath

Matthias Rath is a German businessman interested in pushing his vitamin based pseudoscience on the world. Over the past few years he has been active in South Africa, supporting the government in their outright refusal to administer anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS (which infects up to a quarter of the population and kills at least 800 people a day there). Ben Goldacre brought up the point that vitamin pills don't cure AIDS and devoted a chapter of Bad Science to it. Rath's response might have been, in fact, to quietly show Goldacre his convincing research, to be subsequently published with Goldacre as a co-author... actually he sued. The Guardian happily paid for the lawyers to defend Dr Goldacre, and he won the court case, with Rath paying out around £500,000 in fees due to his massive spanking at the hands of reason. The result of the near 18-month court case was that the chapter on Rath was dropped from the first edition of Bad Science. It is now available in the paperback second edition and free to view online at Amazon.com.[4] Like what happens when most people try to silence people by calling libel and lose, the chapter is now much more damning of Rath and his dealings in South Africa.

[edit] "Criticism"

Goldacre has been "criticised". Quite what these criticisms are is unknown, they're not very well defined in the one "book" that singles out Goldacre. It's certainly not as good as Bad Science to read, filled with random meaningless quotes that no doubt the author thought were "poignant", and most pages are actually half-filled with the footnotes.[5] Wikipedia certainly rejects the source as it is self published.[6] He has also been accused by journalist Steve Connor of being arrogant and lofty in calling journalists "lazy or inaccurate", although Connor's rant against him actually was lazy and inaccurate, thus stretching the irony meter to just below its breaking point.[7]

[edit] Books

  • Bad Science (Fourth Estate ISBN 0007240198, 1 Sep 2008) - based on material from his column, which is expanded upon and discussed at greater length.

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ A rather long build up to one punchline
  2. ↑ Transparent excuse for printing a nice pair of hooters
  3. ↑ The MMR hoax and it's broader category of all his articles here
  4. ↑ The Doctor Will Sue You Now
  5. ↑ Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism - It would make a great Article of the Weak if it weren't so damn long.
  6. ↑ Some Gillian McKieth fanboys try to shoehorn it into an article.
  7. ↑ Bad Science - Steve Connor is an angry man
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