The annals of human history are littered with accounts of charming con-men with a knack for coaxing gullible fellow humans into parting with their hard-earned money.
Not only are these smooth operators hard to detect but their trickeries also fly under our skeptical radars. They sashay around behind the veneer of knowledge and savvy, lead people down the paths of fantasy garden and eventually, swindle them without an iota of resistance.
It’s this type of grifters who have no skin in the game that Ben Goldacre – author of Bad Science – wants us to guard against.
“The aim of this book is that you should be future-proofed against new variants of bullshit. Since producing bullshit requires no conviction, but protection against it does.”
Ben Goldacre
Goldacre’s key targets are the impostors operating under the hood of medicine: the savvy crooks that perpetrate a vast pseudo-scientific deception on the naive populace.
He goes all-guns-blazing at these false gods who profit from the lack of skepticism and grave misunderstanding of science shared by a large majority of citizens.
As a man of science, Goldacre harbors a rightful grudge against those who willfully concoct spurious scientific theories and dupe general public. Homoeopathy, Big pharma, alternative therapy peddlers and cosmetics firms are some of the miscreants that Goldacre dresses down in his book.
He is unambiguous in his criticism of homoeopathy. He fumes at the way homoeopathy continues to thrive despite the absence of sufficient scrutiny from the scientific community. To him, homoeopathy is a sham.
So why do people choose homoeopathy over mainstream medicine? Goldacre says that a disappointing experience with the mainstream medicine is the leading reason why people choose to go the other way.
When he is not picking apart the charlatans, Goldacre wrecks the devious methods these hucksters regularly employ to rig the research outcomes. He instructs the reader to not read too much into an observational study over a proper intervention study.
Pseudoscience experts usually rely on small-sized observational studies – littered with confounding variables they don’t have the expertise to detect – to flaunt their bogus savvy.
Other times, these half-experts count on surrogate endpoints such as blood tests and cherry-pick the studies that fit in with their hypotheses and leave out all the incriminating evidence to arrive at customized but flawed, Procrustean conclusions.
“…out of its $550 billion global annual revenue, the pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on promotion and admin as it does on R&D.”
Ben Goldacre
The endless barrage of marketing salvos and PR rhetoric from the pharma firms is another contentious bone for the author.
He is resentful because people have deserted good-old green veggies in favor of vitamin pills and antioxidants, all in the name of vibrant well-being.
Much to my sadistic delight, Goldacre tears into the antioxidant fad. He cites a Cochrane systematic review that covers all the placebo-controlled randomized trials of antioxidant supplements ever performed.
In a chilling confirmation, the study establishes a positive correlation between consumption of antioxidants and a slight increase in mortality. More antioxidants, huh?
In the chapter called Is Mainstream Medicine Evil, he disrobes a host of unethical, wicked practices that pharma companies indulge in to get their drugs to market quickly.
For instance, a majority of clinical trials – an expensive proposition – are conducted or commissioned by pharma industry itself. Consequently, the drug companies wield an enormous influence over what gets researched and what gets published.
“Everything in media is robbed of any scientific meat, in a desperate bid to seduce an imaginary mass who aren’t interested.”
Ben Goldacre
Most trials are conducted on healthy young people – even if the medication is meant for older people – in order to get suitable results.
Further, only positive trials make it to the academic papers and journals whereas those with negative outcomes are often banished to the back-burner.
And to top it all, trials of diseases with a concentration in developing world or frontier countries are often declared a failed proposition straight away due to a perceived lack of monetary adequacy and hence, never pursued. It is shameful but true!
Media’s inability to make heads and tails of ‘Science’ irks the author. In Goldacre’s words, “Everything in media is robbed of any scientific meat, in a desperate bid to seduce an imaginary mass who aren’t interested.“
A crucial highlight of the book is the author’s postmortem of the media-engineered MMR hoax in the UK.
Cloaked in melodrama, British media made one cardinal sin after another to fuel the anti-MMR spiel for nine long years. Such was the hyperbole surrounding the hoax that British media snugly ignored all the dissenting evidence.
In the MMR case, several experienced authors and columnists so astonishingly ignored the fact that the study that made them roll all over had in fact never been published in a single academic journal – a major benchmark for most scientific findings.
Conclusion
Bad Science is an explosive book. It’s full of eye-opening takeaways and scary revelations. I like the no-holds-barred approach of the author. He induces a sense of healthy skepticism in the reader with respect to the baffling world of fancy pills and alternative therapies.
In conclusion, you don’t need a white-coat-clad, jargon-spouting pseudo-expert telling you to consume vitamin pills and antioxidant supplements to stay fit.
Good, old-fashioned healthy-eating practices have more impact and are easy to follow. But then as Goldacre sarcastically remarks, “…where is the spectacle in that?“