The God Con
  • The God Con
  • About
  • Book Purchase/Contact Author
  • Index
  • HMS Terror Wood Model
Tap the quote to scroll...

​
​The God Con
Pay
Pray Obey​

Certainly not The Good Book,
But perhaps a good book.
Picture

Bad Science; Ben Goldacre; 2008; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 258 pgs

12/9/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Ben Goldacre is a UK Physician. He has written two books on this general subject: the shorter Bad Science and the longer Bad Pharma. He is a good writer with a cutting sense of humor. Unlike most doctors (GPs anyway) he knows a thing or two about statistics and probabilities.

Blythe  N. and Dave H. know about my disdain for chiropractors. During our radio days, their disdain  for nutritionists turned out to be just as strong. Ben would concur.

Goldacre fires broadsides at the usual targets such as homeopathy, as well as a few lessor known examples of bad science, like brain training, detoxing, and the anti-oxidant scare. And like many other skeptical publications, he takes a close look at placebos and regression to the mean, the life blood of quacks everywhere.

Good vs bad science is easy to recognize, even for the cognoscenti, and for every study, there is an opposing study. To deal with this, a check list protocol was set up called JADAD a meta-analysis protocol was built on JADAD called the Cochrane Collaboration. These two ideas allow the truth to eventually come out. It is likely, for example, that the recent reversal on cholesterol was based on this method.

Surprisingly for some, he poo-poos placebo based trials, as this is often a dodge. Researchers test their products (i.e.: drug) against placebo, the lowest possible standard, and not against the best product on the market at the time.

A major warning from the good doctor: If anyone expresses anything with respect to diet in terms of certainty, they are full of crap. He debunks another myth by stating that most of modern medicine is, in fact, evidence based.

Here are some fun real-world examples (think big tobacco) of cheating in the business of drug science.
  • Confirm your own results;
  • Only compare your product to placebo;
  • If testing against a competitor's drug, do not follow its dosage instructions;
  • Only report surrogate results;
  • If your tests perform badly, ditch them, or delay their publication;
  • Beat your data to death until you get a positive correlation;
  • Assume correlation is causation;
  • If your drug is performing poorly against placebo, adjust the baseline (move the goal posts);
  • Ignore trial dropout rates;
  • Wash your data and ditch outliers;
  • Do tests until you get the result you want (sort of like Quebec sovereignty), then publish selectively;
  • Do not publish your data, or only publish the washed data;
  • Publish the same results, but written up differently, in several publications;
  • Hide harm (e.g.: don't publish contra-indicators).

Or do what the NFL did: set up its own bad research; establish a self-published journal; and then stack it with doctors on the take (see League of Denial).

Both Bad Pharma and this book go into some detail on this topic. One solution, which is not yet been adopted, is to register experiments before they start. This forces a priori documentation of experiment protocols, success/ fail criteria, etc. and would go a long way toward eliminating some of the manipulation that goes on today.    

The books closes with a discussion of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) fiasco. Ben has a few kind words for Jenny McCarthy et al.

This is must reading for all skeptics.




0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Lee Moller is a life-long skeptic and atheist and the author of The God Con.

    Archives

    December 2024
    August 2024
    May 2024
    January 2024
    November 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017

    Categories

    All
    Books
    Comment
    Critical Thinking And Skepticism
    Donald Trump
    Quotes
    RCC
    Reviews
    Science
    The God Con

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • The God Con
  • About
  • Book Purchase/Contact Author
  • Index
  • HMS Terror Wood Model