Powerband. Nutrition. Bad Science » Bill Nelson wins the internet. Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday August 9 2008 Silly season is in full swing. At the Telegraph, their correspondent has gone for a bioenergetic health audit. “The resident homoeopath, Katie Jermine, quizzed me about my diet, stress levels and lifestyle. She then strapped on a wristband and plugged me into an electronic device called the Quantum QXCI, which scanned my system for vitamins, minerals, food intolerances, toxicity, organ function, hormone balance, parasites, digestive disorders and stress levels.”
We’ve all come to accept that the hypochondriac pages are somehow exempt from the transaction constraints of “cash for précised true facts” in the newsagents. What is the mysterious QXCI machine? Quantum, of course, is a word that many interpret as permission to make stuff up, although almost the entire electronic manufacturing output of the world is driven by a perfectly adequate understanding and application of quantum principles.
Library, The Art of Cold Reading. The Art of "Cold Reading" The currently-popular "psychics" like Sylvia Browne, James Van Praagh, and John Edward, who are getting so much TV space on Montel Williams, Larry King, and other shows, employ a technique known as "cold reading. " They tell the subjects nothing, but make guesses, put out suggestions, and ask questions. This is a very deceptive art, and the unwary observer may come away believing that unknown data was developed by some wondrous means. Not so. Examples: "I get an older man here" is a question, a suggestion, and a guess by the "reader," who expects some reaction from the subject, and usually gets it.
The readers have a way of leading the subject to believe that they knew something they didn't. Reader: "Did your husband linger on in the hospital, or did he pass quickly? " It's strange that the reader (Van Praagh, in this example) had to ask that question..... We tested Sylvia Browne in 1989, on live TV, and she failed miserably. T.K. Return to the library main page. Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements. See the data: bit.ly/snakeoilsupps. See the static versionSee the old flash version Check the evidence for so-called Superfoods visualized. Note: You might see multiple bubbles for certain supplements. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc.
As ever, we welcome your thoughts, crits, comments, corrections, compliments, tweaks, new evidence, missing supps, and general feedback. » Purchase: Amazon US or Barnes & Noble | UK or Waterstones » Download: Apple iBook | Kindle (UK & US) » See inside For more graphics, visualisations and data-journalism: The bullshit box. Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 10 July 2010 This week the food and nutrition pills industries are complaining. They like to make health claims about their products, which often turn out to be unsupported by the evidence. Regulating that mess would be tedious and long-winded, the kind of project enjoyed by the EU, and so the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation was brought in during 2006. Since then, member states have submitted tens of thousands of health claims on behalf of manufacturers about cranberries, fish oil, and every magical ingredient you can think of.
“The regulation is killing this industry and the job losses are already being felt,” says the head of the International Probiotics Association. Trusting nobody, and as a very boring man, I decided to read some adjudications. The pharmaceutical company want to claim that Eye-Q fish oil capsules improve working memory in children, and so they sent in references to 6 studies (the deliberations are in full online). New cheap paperback edition of Bad Science is out now - Bad Science. Just so that your visual search strategy is correctly callibrated for bookshops and friends’ living rooms, here is the cover of the new and cheaper edition of Bad Science. It features both an index and a new chapter, which I will post for free on the web in a minute. More below. If you’re wondering why there is a new paperback, the previous was a “trade paperback”, and this is a normal one. Basically I didn’t want to have a hardback as I think they’re stupid fetish items when books should be cheap, convenient devices for transporting words around, but the best I could do was trade paperback first, and I’m pleased to see that this new edition is already turning up for as little as £3.50 on Amazon marketplace.
Here’s the publisher review round up blurb: ‘There aren’t many out and out good eggs in British journalism but Ben Goldacre is one of them! Fight back. For my own use really, there are links to more reviews here: LRB · Mark Greenberg: Apocalypse Not Just Now. John Leslie comes to tell us that the end of the world is closer than we think.
His book is no ordinary millennial manifesto, however. Leslie is a sophisticated philosopher of science, and the source of his message is not divine revelation, apocalyptic fantasy or anxiety about the year-2000 computer problem, but ‘the Doomsday Argument’ – an a priori argument that seeks support in probability theory. In fact, the most interesting questions The End of the World raises are not, despite its subtitle, about our eventual demise. Rather, they concern our susceptibility, when thinking about risk, uncertainty and probability, to a kind of cognitive illusion. The Argument claims that the observation that we are alive now increases the probability that Homo sapiens will become extinct in the relatively near future.
It may seem preposterous that such a conclusion could be reached by armchair reasoning from the mere fact of our being alive now. The second condition is easier to miss. Bad Science » The Medicalisation of Everyday Life. As the pace of medical innovation slows to a crawl, how do drug companies stay in profit? By ‘discovering’ new illnesses to fit existing products. But, says Ben Goldacre, in the second extract from his new book, for many problems the cure will never be found in a pill. Ben Goldacre The Guardian Monday September 1 2008 When you’ve been working with bullshit for as long as I have, you start to spot recurring themes: quacks and the pharmaceutical industry use the exact same tricks to sell their pills, everybody loves a “science bit” – even if it’s wrong – and when people introduce pseudoscience into any explanation, it’s usually because there’s something else they’re trying desperately not to talk about. But my favourite is this: alternative therapists, the media, and the drug industry all conspire to sell us reductionist, bio-medical explanations for problems that might more sensibly and constructively be thought of as social, political, or personal.
No. Times have changed. Bad Science: Ben Goldacre: Books.