New edition of “Testing Treatments”, best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.

October 18th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in great popularisers of science, methods | 6 Comments »

People often ask if there’s one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly “Testing Treatments“. I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it’s just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full text as a PDF for free here, and there are translations in various languages for free on that page too. I recommend getting a paper copy (they’re lovely and it’s very readable) here, there’s a proper Kindle edition here, and the publisher page is here. Meanwhile a website version with extra resources is coming shortly.

I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity.  My foreword for the new edition is pasted below. Read the rest of this entry »

Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist

May 15th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in adverts, bad science, competing interests, great popularisers of science, scare stories | 74 Comments »

Edit midday Saturday: I’ve just read the Guardian version and it’s been cut a bit, whole chunks missing, and bits rewritten. This is the best reason to have a blog. Anyway, if Baroness Greenfield responds – and naturally I hope she will, as there is a great deal more to say on this topic – I hope she will respond to what I actually wrote, below.

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 16 May 2009

You will be familiar with the work of Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield. She is head of the Royal Institute Institution of Great Britain, where she has charged herself with promoting the public’s understanding of science, of what it means for there to be evidence for a given proposition. This is important work.

You will also doubtless be aware of her more prominent activity on the many terrifying risks of computers, exemplified in the Daily Mail headline “Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist”, “Computers could be fuelling obesity crisis, says Baroness Susan Greenfield” in the Telegraph, “Do you have Facebook flab? Computer use could make you eat too much, warns professor” in the Mail again, Read the rest of this entry »