Читать книгу Bad Science - Ben Goldacre - Страница 15

And now for the meat. But before we take a single step into this arena, we should be clear on one thing: despite what you might think, I’m not desperately interested in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a dubious piece of phraseological rebranding in itself). I am interested in the role of medicine, our beliefs about the body and healing, and I am fascinated—in my day job—by the intricacies of how we can gather evidence for the benefits and risks of a given intervention.

Homeopathy, in all of this, is simply our tool.

So here we address one of the most important issues in science: how do we know if an intervention works? Whether it’s a face cream, a detox regime, a school exercise, a vitamin pill, a parenting programme or a heart-attack drug, the skills involved in testing an intervention are all the same. Homeopathy makes the clearest teaching device for evidence-based medicine for one simple reason: homeopaths give out little sugar pills, and pills are the easiest thing in the world to study.

By the end of this section you will know more about evidence-based medicine and trial design than the average doctor. You will understand how trials can go wrong, and give false positive results, how the placebo effect works, and why we tend to overestimate the efficacy of pills. More importantly, you will also see how a health myth can be created, fostered and maintained by the alternative medicine industry, using all the same tricks on you, the public, which big pharma uses on doctors. This is about something much bigger than homeopathy.