Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks »

Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster, and doctor best known for the Bad Science column in The Guardian. Trained in Oxford and London, with brief forays into academia, Goldacre works full-time for the National Health Service.

Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster, and doctor best known for the Bad Science column in The Guardian. Trained in Oxford and London, with brief forays into academia, Goldacre works full-time for the National Health Service.

Have you ever wondered how one day the media can assert that alcohol is bad for us and the next unashamedly run a story touting the benefits of daily alcohol consumption? Or how a drug that is pulled off the market for causing heart attacks ever got approved in the first place? How can average readers, who aren’t medical doctors or Ph.D.s in biochemistry, tell what they should be paying attention to and what’s, well, just more bullshit?

Ben Goldacre has made a point of exposing quack doctors and nutritionists, bogus credentialing programs, and biased scientific studies. But he has also taken the media to task for its willingness to throw facts and proof out the window in its quest to sell more copies. Now Goldacre is taking on America and its bad science in this revised version of his runaway U.K. bestseller. But he’s not here just to tell you what’s wrong. Goldacre is here to teach you how to evaluate placebo effects, double-blind studies, and sample size, so that you can recognize bad science when you see it. You’re about to feel a whole lot better.

The New York Times - Katherine Bouton

Ben Goldacre is exasperated. He's not exactly angry—that would be much less fun to read—except in certain circumstances. He is irked, vexed, bugged, ticked off at the sometimes inadvertent (because of stupidity) but more often deliberate deceptions perpetrated in the name of science. And he wants you, the reader, to share his feelings…[Bad Science is] illustrated with lucid charts and graphs, footnoted…indexed and far more serious than it looks. Depending on your point of view, you'll find it downright snarky or wittily readable.

Preface ix

1 Matter 3

2 Brain Gym 15

3 The Progenium XY Complex 23

4 Homeopathy 30

5 The Placebo Effect 65

6 The Nonsense du Jour 87

7 Nutritionists 112

8 The Doctor Will Sue You Now 131

9 Is Mainstream Medicine Evil? 147

10 Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things 172

11 Bad Stats 186

12 The Media's MMR Hoax 208

And Another Thing 253

Notes 259

Further Reading and Acknowledgments 271

Index 275