Bad Science (2008) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Gillian McKeith: The fake doctor/snake oil saleswoman/"that awful poo woman"
• Andrew Wakefield: Doctor whose claims about the MMR vaccine has now been debunked.
• Matthias Rath: Add a description of this character.
• Lucia
• Krigsman
• Mbeki
• Daniel

Quotes edit see section history

• “It won't even be slightly difficult, because this is the only science lesson where I can guarantee that the people making the stupid mistakes won't be you. And if, by the end, you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.”

  Ben Goldacre

• “Sensible dietary practices, which we all know about, still stand. But the unjustified, unnnecessary overcomplication of this basic dietary advice is, to my mind, one of the greatest crimes of the nutritionist movement. As I have said, I don't think it's excessive to talk about consumers paralyzed with confusion in supermakets.”

• “Back in the real world, genuine public health interventions to address the social and lifestyle causes of diseases are far less lucrative, and far less of a spectacle, than anything a vitamin pill peddler, or a nutritionist, would care to engage with.”

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• You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

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• As Voltaire said, “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

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• it needs to be a strong association, which is consistent, and specific to the thing you are studying, where the putative cause comes before the supposed effect in time; ideally there should be a biological gradient, such as a dose-response effect; it should be consistent or at least not completely at odds with what is already known (because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence); and it should be biologically plausible.

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• The second theme is perhaps more interesting: the proprietorialization of common sense. You can take a perfectly sensible intervention, like a glass of water and an exercise break, but add nonsense, make it sound more technical, and make yourself sound clever. This will enhance the placebo effect, but you might also wonder whether the primary goal is something much more cynical and lucrative: to make common sense copyrightable, unique, patented, and owned.

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• In general, you don’t absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting.

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• 5. Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs.

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• I can very happily view fancy cosmetics—and other forms of quackery—as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don’t understand science properly.

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• These are just stories, and the plural of “anecdote” is not data.

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• When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. —Stephen Jay Gould

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• As it happens, this very phenomenon has been studied in a fascinating set of experiments from the March 2008 edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, which elegantly demonstrated that people will buy into bogus explanations much more readily when they are dressed up with a few technical words from the world of neuroscience.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United Kingdom
• South Africa
• United States
• London
• Europe

Organizations edit see section history

• http://www.badscience.net/: The website behind the book - provides additional information and is a source of research mentioned in the book

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Ben Goldacre (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Samuel Johnson Prize (Finalist, 2009, Shortlist)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 500

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history