I’m doing this awesome massive nerd tour with Simon Singh, Brian Cox and Robin Ince. We will talk about science and it will be funny. Also, we will make a Spinal Tap tour video. Come! There will be shouting and enthusiasm and nerd facts just like in our Godless shows and festival stuff.
The year in nonsense
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 December 2010
It’s been a marvellous year for bullshit. We saw quantitative evidence showing that drug adverts aimed at doctors are routinely factually inaccurate, while pharmaceutical company ghostwriters were the secret hands behind letters to the Times, and a whole series of academic papers. We saw more drug companies and even regulators withholding evidence from doctors and patients that a drug was dangerous – the most important and neglected ethical issue in modern medicine — and that whistleblowers have a rubbish life. Read the rest of this entry »
NMT are suing Dr Wilmshurst. So how trustworthy are this company? Let’s look at their website…
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 11 December 2010
You will hopefully remember – from the era before Wikileaks – that US medical device company NMT are suing NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the conduct and results of the MIST trial, which sadly for NMT found no evidence that their device prevents migraine. The MIST trial was funded by NMT, and Wilmshurst was lead investigator until problems arose.
Wilmshurst has already paid £100,000 of his own money to defend himself, risking his house, and spent every weekend and all his annual leave, unpaid, dealing with this, at great cost to his family. So what kind of a company is NMT Medical, that the British libel courts have allowed to hound one man for almost two years? And how trustworthy are their utterances?
I made a documentary about science and libel for the BBC: here it is
Hi all, I made a documentary for the BBC World Service on libel and science. It’s really good, go and listen to it here:
Illusions of control
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 December 2010
Why do clever people believe stupid things? It’s difficult to make sense of the world from the small atoms of experience that we each gather as we wander around it, and a new paper in the British Journal of Psychology this month shows how we can create illusions of causality, much like visual illusions, if we manipulate the cues and clues we present. Read the rest of this entry »
