This is Stuff You Like, you can call me Ursa, and before I was a person who made videos
on the Internet, I read Engineering.
I have a Masters degree.
I know, they just hand them out to anybody.
After that I was, among other things, a private tutor in maths and english and science for
secondary school children.
And when we were discussing science and we had to talk about electrolysis or the scientific
method or whatever, I would often refer to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, because it was
more fun, or just less punny, than the revision guides.
The GCSE revision guides are full of puns.
I mean, I like puns but I understand they're not everybody's thing.
But yes, Bad Science: I loved it and I recommended it to pretty much everyone, not just because
it's a good read but because I think that it’s a crying shame we don’t really teach
even the basics of epidemiology in schools.
I should point out at this juncture that epidemiology is the science of health: like...what makes
us sick and what makes us well and all of that good stuff.
Especially because we are all completely obsessed with health fads and exercise fads and dieting
fads and yet most of us don't really understand even the basics of evidence-based medicine.
And evidence-based medicine is freaking awesome so we should.
Bad Science is (and I use the word advisedly) EVANGELICAL on the subject of evidence-based
medicine.
And it is basically a primer on epidemiology and it takes you through stuff like:
how does a trial work?
How do we decide if it was a good trial or a bad trial where they cooked the books?
What are the tricks that complementary medicine uses to make their stuff seem more appealing?
What are the tricks pharmaceutical companies use to make their stuff seem more appealing?
What’s the placebo effect?
What’s the nocebo effect?
And various other things.
The book pokes fun at homeopathy and nutritionism and Gillian McKeith and many other things
with wild abandon, and it's sharp and witty and incisive and it doesn't talk down to the
audience.
A couple of jokes about humanities graduates aside.
And frankly for their misrepresentation of science in the public eye they deserve it.
The most uplifting thing I found in the book is the explanation of meta-analysis, a technique
for smooshing together the results of lots of small studies to get a bigger picture,
which is such an amazing and beautiful and USEFUL thing that it made me want to run out
and buy a pair of Cochrane Collaboration blobbogram earrings.
Apparently those don't exist.
[Get to it, Etsy.]
There are in the book occasional nerdy statistical moments, but they are so well explained that
you won't really feel like you're learning at all.
And you know, you can just skip them if you're really desperate.
Ben Goldacre himself is a GP, which is to say, Americans, a General Practitioner.
Your family doctor, basically.
Pharmaceutical companies accuse him of being a shill for the complementary medicine brigade,
and the complementary medicine lot accuse him of being in the pocket of Big Pharma.
So you know he has to be doing something right.
The negative reviews of the book tend to either dislike the writing style...fair enough...or
accuse him, in a book about Bad Science, of not including enough positive examples of
whatever it is they are in favour of.
A book dedicated to lampooning bad examples of science does not contain enough positive
examples of...whatever it is they like.
Most of the book is insightful and funny and full of examples of humans and our human-ness,
and I think you should read it you might like it, and it’s possible just to leave it at
that.
Then again, I should warn you, there is a chapter in there on Matthias Rath.
And that’s where things take a turn for the dark.
In 2008 Rath sued both Goldacre and the Guardian newspaper for libel, (eventually dropping
the case)
Why?
Well, Goldacre criticised him because, “He bought full page adverts denouncing
Aids drugs while promoting his vitamin pills in South Africa, a country where hundreds
of thousands die every year from Aids under an HIV denialist president and the population
is ripe for miracle cures.
I said his actions were highly worrying, in no uncertain terms.
I believe I was right to do so.”
To give you an example of how that plays out in Rath’s early career, he took out ads
in European newspaper which adverts claimed that
“90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment”,
and suggested that three million lives could be saved if they stopped having chemotherapy
and instead took more vitamins.
Actually, even if you don’t buy the book, that chapter is freely available online, although
I warn you it is...chilling.
And because of it I’ve never quite looked complementary medicine the same way since.
And it’s all very well to believe in homeopathy or reflexology.
I have great faith in the power of the placebo effect, and indeed in the power of homeopathy,
it is exactly as effective as the placebo effect, which is much better than ineffective...
But it's not the same thing as being as good as conventional medicine.
"In the conclusion to this book, written before I was able to include this chapter, I will
argue that the biggest dangers posed by the material we have covered are cultural and
intellectual.
I may be mistaken."
That was kind of a downer.
But seriously, read the book, it's really good.
Or read the free chapter online and read the blog, which is less cohesive but still pretty
darn funny.
Read it.
Learn things.
And watch Barbie get detoxed by a car battery.
And if you liked the show and you would like to support me making more videos, then go
up...somewhere...if you're on YouTube, because that will take you to my Patreon page where
you can support me for a dollar a month or five dollars a month or...one MILLION DOLLARS
A MONTH-
OK, probably not that much, but still, consider donating, and I will see you next time for
something...I haven't decided yet.
But something.