Bad Science

Bad Science
Автор книги: id книги: 1133475     Оценка: 0.0     Голосов: 0     Отзывы, комментарии: 0 785,07 руб.     (7,93$) Читать книгу Купить и скачать книгу Купить бумажную книгу Электронная книга Жанр: Прочая образовательная литература Правообладатель и/или издательство: HarperCollins Дата добавления в каталог КнигаЛит: ISBN: 9780007283194 Скачать фрагмент в формате   fb2   fb2.zip Возрастное ограничение: 0+ Оглавление Отрывок из книги

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Описание книги

Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.'Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. This book will be about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments – from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads. This book will help people to quantify their instincts – that a lot of the so-called 'science' which appears in the media and in advertising is just wrong or misleading. It will be satirical and amusing – exposing the ridiculous – but it will also provide the reader with the facts they need.Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.

Оглавление

Ben Goldacre. Bad Science

BEN GOLDACRE. Bad Science

1. Matter

Detox and the theatre of goo

Ear candles

Detox patches and the ‘hassle barrier’

If it’s not science, what is it?

2. Brain Gym

3. The Progenium XY Complex

4. Homeopathy

What is homeopathy?

The dilution problem

I demand a fair trial

‘Miracle’ Cures Shown to Work

Blinding

Randomisation

Meta-analysis

5. The Placebo Effect

The placebo on trial

What the treatment looks like

What the doctor says

‘Placebo explanations’

More than molecules?

An ethical placebo?

6. The Nonsense du Jour

The four key errors. Does the data exist?

Observation, or intervention?

From the lab bench to the glossies

Cherry-picking

Problematising antioxidants

The antioxidant dream unravels

7. Dr Gillian McKeith PhD

Dr McKeith puts a cabbie straight

8 ‘Pill Solves Complex Social Problem’ Medicalisation—or ‘Will fish-oil pills make my child a genius?’

Why you have a placebo group

Durham defend themselves

The fish-oil evidence

The power is in the pill?

Calming down: the apothecary industrial complex

The wheels of time

9. Professor Patrick Holford

AIDS, cancer and vitamin pills

A vaguely systematic review

Professor?

10. The Doctor Will Sue You Now

APPROPRIATE CRIMINAL SANCTION

11. Is Mainstream Medicine Evil?

The pharmaceutical industry

The journey of a drug

Ignore the protocol entirely

Play with the baseline

Ignore dropouts

Clean up the data

‘The best of five … no … seven … no … nine!’

Torture the data

Try every button on the computer

How can this be possible?

Publication bias and suppressing negative results

Duplicate publication

Hiding harm

Vioxx

Authors forbidden to publish data

The single cheap solution that will solve all of the problems in the entire world

Adverts

12. How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science

Wacky stories—money for nothing

‘All men will have big willies’

‘Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle, study says’

Stats, miracle cures and hidden scares

‘Research has shown…’

13. Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things

Randomness

Regression to the mean

The bias towards positive evidence

Biased by our prior beliefs

Availability

Social influences

14. Bad Stats

The biggest statistic

Choosing your figures

Cocaine floods the playground

OK, back to an easy one

Beating you up

Locking you up

The ecological fallacy

The prosecutor’s fallacy

Losing the lottery

15. Health Scares

The Great MRSA Hoax

Epilogue

16. The Media’s MMR Hoax

Vaccine scares in context

Andrew Wakefield and his Lancet paper

The story behind the paper

The press coverage begins

Autism

Leo Blair

What was in these stories?

The evidence on MMR

Scientific ‘evidence’ in the media

What they didn’t tell you

Old diseases return

Chapter 1: Matter

Chapter 5: The Placebo Effect

Chapter 6: The Nonsense du Jour

Chapter 7: Dr Gillian McKeith PhD

Chapter 8: ‘Pill Solves Complex Social Problem’

Chapter 9: Professor Patrick Holford

Chapter 10: The Doctor Will Sue You Now

Chapter 11: Is Mainstream Medicine Evil?

Chapter 12: How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science

Chapter 13: Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things

Chapter 14: Bad Stats

Chapter 15: Health Scares

Chapter 16: The Media’s MMR Hoax

And Another Thing

Отрывок из книги

Dedication

To whom it may concern

.....

There is a long history of upset being caused by trials, in medicine as much as anywhere, and all kinds of people will mount all kinds of defences against them. Archie Cochrane, one of the grandfathers of evidence-based medicine, once amusingly described how different groups of surgeons were each earnestly contending that their treatment for cancer was the most effective: it was transparently obvious to them all that their own treatment was the best. Cochrane went so far as to bring a collection of them together in a room, so that they could witness each other’s dogged but conflicting certainty, in his efforts to persuade them of the need for trials. Judges, similarly, can be highly resistant to the notion of trialling different forms of sentence for heroin users, believing that they know best in each individual case. These are recent battles, and they are in no sense unique to the world of homeopathy.

So, we take our group of people coming out of a homeopathy clinic, we switch half their pills for placebo pills, and we measure who gets better. That’s a placebo-controlled trial of homeopathy pills, and this is not a hypothetical discussion: these trials have been done on homeopathy, and it seems that overall, homeopathy does no better than placebo.

.....

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