Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 16 October 2010

You will be familiar with the Daily Mail’s ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. Individual entries are now barely worth documenting, and the phenomenon is best appreciated in bulk through websites such as the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project and Kill Or Cure, with its alphabetised list: from almonds, apples and artificial light; through horseradish, hotdrinks and housework; to wasabi, water, watercress, and more.

But occasionally one story pops up to illustrate a wider issue, and “Strict diet two days a week ‘cuts risk of breast cancer by 40 per cent’” is a good example. It goes on: “a strict diet for two days a week consisting solely of vegetables, fruit, milk and a mug of Bovril could prevent breast cancer, scientists say.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 9 October 2010

What does it mean to say that a psychological or behavioural condition has a biological cause? Over the past week more battles have been raging over ADHD, after a paper published by a group of Cardiff researchers found evidence that there is a genetic association with the condition. Their study looked for chromosomal deletions and duplications known as “copy number variants” (CNV) and found that these were present in 16% of the children with ADHD.

What many reports did not tell you – including the Guardian – is that this same pattern of CNV was also found in 8% of the children without ADHD. So that’s not a massive difference.

But more interesting were the moral and cultural interpretations heaped onto this finding, Read the rest of this entry »

I’m speaking tomorrow at the protest against science cuts, it’s 2pm outside the Treasury, wear something that looks like your field, maybe a white coat, or a telescope, or a field if you’re a botanist.

Details of the protest:

scienceisvital.org.uk/ Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010

Like all students of wrongness, I’m fascinated by research into irrational beliefs and behaviours, but I’m also suspicious of how far you can stretch the findings from a laboratory into the real world. A cracking new paper from Social Psychology and Personality Science makes a neat attempt to address this shortcoming. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 25 September 2010

The Sun, of all people, are angry about pornography: “THE hard-up NHS is blowing taxpayers’ cash on PORN for sperm donors, a report reveals today.” The Telegraph immediately followed suit. Some clinics provide pornography for men masturbating in clinic rooms to produce sperm for IVF with their partners. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 September 2010

If I tell you that Katie Price did not, necessarily, write her own book, this is not a revelation. From academics I have slightly higher expectations, but now the legal system has spat out another skip full of documents: this time, we get a new insight into the strange phenomenon of medical ghost-writing. Read the rest of this entry »

This week the pope is in London. You will have your own views on the discrimination against women, the homophobia, and the international criminal conspiracy to cover up for mass child rape. My special interest is his role in the 2 million people who die of Aids each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 September 2010

Everyone likes to imagine they are rational, fair, and free from prejudice. But how easily are we misled by appearances? Noola Griffiths is an academic who studies the psychology of music, and she’s published a cracking paper on what women wear, and how that effects your judgement of their performance. The results are predictable; but the context is interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010

For simpletons and amateurs, there are good research methods, and bad research methods. In reality, different tools are valuable in different situations, and sometimes, even very tiny numbers of people can give you a meaningful piece of information: even an anecdote can be informative. Read the rest of this entry »