Friendly bacteria?

January 29th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, cosmetics, very basic science | 3 Comments »

Friendly bacteria?

Ben Goldacre
Thursday January 29, 2004
The Guardian

· In the hands of a pseudoscientist, even morally neutral items like bacteria and salt can become “good” or “bad”. Paul Flowers writes in to tell us about Carex soap, available in his local pharmacy: “Carex effectively removes bad bacteria on hands, whilst gently protecting the good.” Presumably the soap molecules carefully examine the surface receptors and DNA profile of the bacteria, before comparing this against a comprehensive database of man’s vulnerabilities to bacterial attack, in order to calculate exactly how dangerous they might be, before ranking them in ascending order of evil?

· Meanwhile, reader Adam Rice is slightly worried about the advice his father is being peddled on the “metabolic acceptability” of certain brands of salt. “After a number of articles on the danger of salt consumption appeared in the Guardian, my father resolved to give up his prodigious salt habit. To help in this endeavour, my mother purchased a fabulously eccentric book entitled Get the Salt Out by Ann Louise Gittleman (MS, CNS PhD).” In the spirit of all the best pseudoscientists, Ann calls upon the rhetorical force of the experimental method to bolster her case: “Put the salt you now use to a test to determine its metabolic acceptability: add a spoonful to a glass of plain water, stir it several times, and let it stand overnight. If the salt collects in a thick layer on the bottom of the glass, your salt has failed the test: it is heavily processed and not very usable by the body. To give your body salt it can use, switch instead to an unrefined natural salt that will dissolve in a glass of water as well as in bodily fluids. This experiment gives you a visual example of what refined salt can do to your system: collect in body organs and clog up the circulatory system.” I never knew that.

· Fortunately for us all, Adam has done his own experiment. “In the interests of science, I borrowed some road salt from the tub at the end of the road. I reckon since it’s completely unrefined its metabolic acceptability must be beyond compare. I stirred a teaspoon into a glass of water and left it overnight, but I must have done something wrong because now there’s a nasty brown scum on the bottom of the glass. Probably just as well I didn’t try it on my chips.”

More than water?

January 22nd, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in alternative medicine, bad science, detox, oxygen, water | 7 Comments »

More than water?

Ben Goldacre
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

· What is it with pseudo scientists and water? After last week’s cluster nonsense, Caroline Stacey was getting excited in the Independent’s Food and Drink section about Oxygizer water. “Oxygizer doesn’t just slake a thirst, it provides the body with extra oxygen too. A litre contains 150mg of oxygen, around 25 times more than what’s in a litre of tap water.” Handy. “This apparently helps remove toxins and ensures a stronger immune system, as well as assisting the respiratory system, so you recover better from exercise … cleverly they’ve added something to water that’s not an additive.”

· So, once more in the spirit of noble Victorian gentleman scientist self experimenters, I decided to put Oxygizer to the test. Back in the 60s, a scientist in New York managed to get mice breathing underwater, from a saline solution at six times normal atmospheric pressure, just like in that movie The Abyss – it takes a lifetime of popular science books to collect this kind of trivia. Unfortunately, the mice died after 18 hours, and I didn’t want to upset the animal experimentation lobby.

· So, I decided to drink the stuff after a three-mile run. I take in about 100ml of oxygen with every breath, or 150mg, and, like most humans, I only absorb about 30mg of that. That’s 300mg a minute, but after serious exercise it goes up to about 3,000mg a minute. To help myself recover significantly faster after my run, I figured I’d need an extra 20% of oxygen, or 600mg a minute. That meant drinking 40 litres of Oxygizer over 10 minutes, getting the stuff down me at the fearsome rate of one litre every 15 seconds, at a cost of £120, and almost doubling my weight, but it’s all in the name of science. Fairly soon my circulatory system was so overloaded that I was producing several pints of frothy sputum at the back of my throat. Then my abdomen burst open and my Versace running shorts were ruined.

· Needless to say, I was not best pleased. But there’s something rather exciting that I’ve just discovered about the Guardian website: our articles tend to come out right at the top of Google keyword searches so, as my final act of revenge, en route to the morgue, you’ll forgive me for using the word Oxygizer as much as Oxygizer possible just in case anyone Oxygizer ever looks Oxygizer up to buy some Oxygizer …

When the sums don’t add up

January 15th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, scare stories, statistics | 2 Comments »

When the sums don’t add up

Ben Goldacre
Thursday January 15, 2004
The Guardian

Like most people who know the first thing about science, I don’t usually bother to read scare stories in the media, as I know they’re not going to tell me anything useful. Parabens from deodorant in breast cancer cells? That sounds interesting. Oh, you haven’t measured it in normal cells yet. Thanks for wasting my time. Four minutes poorer, life goes on.

And the stories always fit that anti-science, anti-government, anti-industry, anti-medical agenda, as if they were the same thing, with shared blame. But here’s some real news: we’re not doing so badly. In the chemical industry, red-list discharges – releases of the most noxious substances – have fallen by 95% over the past decade.

So I’ll tell you what I want to know from a scare story, or any science story. If it’s about an experiment, I want to know what the experiment was, what the results were and where it was published. That’s not so much to ask. If it’s a story about risk, based on population data, I want to know the number of people looked at and the statistical significance of the data – the figure that tells me how reliable the data is. That’s really not unfair.

Look at the crimes of scare stories. They extrapolate from speculative laboratory data pretending the population data really exists. Or they leave out key information. So this week, eight newspapers reported a possible link between pancreatic cancer and aspirin in women. Most managed to report fairly accurately that it was a study of almost 90,000 women, that those who took two 325mg tablets of aspirin a week for 20 years had a 58% increased risk of pancreatic cancer, and that in women who had taken two tablets per day, the risk increased to 86%. Although only the Times and the Daily Mail reported that the total number of cancer cases was 161 over 18 years. Crucially, only the Times made it clear the 86% increase was only associated with high consumption for at least four years.

Perhaps the public have got their heads screwed on anyway. It’s been shown that scare tactics have little long-term effect on public behaviour: that’s why all those well-intentioned lies about illegal drugs never worked. If the media are to be believed, the day after the salmon story, fish were lying unsold in the ice of Smithfield market, but less than a week later sales are back to normal, just like beef and baby milk.

It looks like the public, unconsciously, apply what those who formulate public policy informed by science call “the precautionary principle”: act cautiously, over a speculative finding, until further data fails to back it up. We stop buying salmon for a day or two on the one in a thousand chance that we’re not being misled, shrug, and get on with our lives. As Bill Hicks once said: “I’ve got news for you: non-smokers die every day.” Two thousand of you will die this year from accidents at home; 200, I’m afraid, will be assaulted and then die; 500 will be accidentally poisoned. Tie your shoelaces, check the milk, and stop looking at my bird, if I were you.

Water torture

January 15th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in africa, bad science, celebs, homeopathy, times, very basic science, water | 3 Comments »

Water torture

Ben Goldacre
Thursday January 15, 2004
The Guardian

Talk bad science

· You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to catch a Sunday Times beauty journalist out. “Harriet Griffey thought bottled water was a con, until mountain-pure H < ->2 O healed her senses.” Let’s stop her right there. I think I can write these things for myself these days. Don’t tell me: water comes in funny “clusters”, which only beauty journalists and the people who make the stuff can detect. You make them smaller with a special secret process, and then they hydrate and absorb toxins better. Oh, and the special water is really expensive (let’s say £13.95 a bottle) but they’ve proved it works with some special science. Which hasn’t been published anywhere. Did I miss anything?

· Let’s just check the inventor’s website. He has an authentically large beard, and the process works “under the principle of implosion and magnetic transfer”. It continues: “This natural magnetic transfer using electromagnetic waves does not come from using magnets or electricity.” Wow, neither? Now that’s impressive. Back to lovely Harriet, in her white chiffon A-line lab coat. “Well, that’s the science _ I am as sceptical as the next person, and am not convinced by hype.” Yes: she’s going to prove it for herself. Experimentally. “Take one lemon. Cut it in half and squeeze each half into two identical glasses. Place one next to a bottle of Blue Water, the other on the opposite side of the room. Wait five minutes, then taste … While the juice in one glass remained wincingly sharp, the lemon in the other, placed next to the Blue Water, was noticeably softer and less tart. Even through glass, the effect of the water is enough to change the taste of the lemon juice.” Head of particle physics on line one for Ms Harriet Griffey.

· Meanwhile, it was a delight to see intellectual Jeanette Winterson, following her recent article on the predictive powers of her favourite astrologer, writing in the Times on Saturday about a project to treat Aids sufferers in Botswana – where 48% of the population is HIV positive – with homeopathy. Some might say it was slightly patronising, unrealistic or even pointless to take your western, patient-empowering, anti-medical establishment and culturally specific placebo to a country that has little healthcare infrastructure, is frequently engaged in a water war with Namibia, and suffers frequent droughts. But we can only guess what the people of Botswana might say.

Chocolate love

January 8th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, celebs, chocolate, PhDs, doctors, and qualifications, weight loss | 12 Comments »

Chocolate love

Ben Goldacre
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

Talk bad science

· With painful inevitability, that old chestnut about chocolate’s health-giving properties popped up on the health and women’s pages of almost every newspaper, as is traditional at Christmas. The Daily Express eagerly pointed out that it’s “a good source” of flavanols, antioxidants, magnesium, zinc and iron. And in the Telegraph: “Chocolate is good for you,” says Chloe Doutre-Roussel, chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Mason. “It has minerals such as fluoride for the teeth and potassium, like bananas.” Doutre-Roussel is, we are told, “an ultra-slim Frenchwoman… Although she eats 1lb of chocolate a day, she weighs a mere 7st 12lb.” Mars, which has been lavishing money on research into the benefits of chocolate for 10 years now, started this tradition five years ago, employing PR consultancy Grayling Healthcare to send out press releases such as “Media Alert: News for Chocolate Lovers this Christmas”.

So, whatever the truth is about minerals, the manufacturers of Galaxy and Milky Way must have been disappointed by recent research showing that what few antioxidants there are in cocoa beans are hardly absorbed from milk chocolate at all. Manufacturers first flaunted chocolate’s healthiness during food shortages after the first world war, and only stopped when we started measuring and labelling the contents. Just as that process got going, the 1930 Food and Drug Review said: “The magic words ‘health giving’ are today the most overworked and loosely applied in the advertising lexicon.” – 74 years ago.

· The Mail on Sunday’s “integrated health expert” Dr Ali was busy this week writing about headaches. “The skull,” he claims, “contracts and expands a dozen times or so each minute to push the [cerebrospinal] fluid round, but tight neck muscles and misaligned skull bones can disrupt this process.” You don’t need to be a doctor like Ali – whose clients include Prince Charles and Geri Halliwell – to know that the skull is a rigid box of bone and, since you asked, the fluid is kept moving by the waving movements of cilia lining the ventricles, respiratory and arterial pulsations, postural changes and the pressure gradient between the places where it’s made and reabsorbed. Ali, despite qualifying in Delhi and Moscow, is not registered with the General Medical Council because, his website informs us, “the treatment which he personally provides uses massage, diet, yoga and natural supplements and oils which do not need prescription”. Why not rob a bank and visit him anyway, at his “Integrated Health Centre”, just off Harley Street.