Well founded suspicions of Sensationalised Science Reporting

One of my daughters gave me a super Christmas present this year, the book  “Bad Science”, by Ben Goldacre.

This is a wonderful work and should be a set book for all “A” level schoolkids. There are chapters on:

• Brain Gym
• Homeopathy
• the Placebo Effect
• Mainstream Medicine
• How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science
• Medical “trials”
• the Pharmaceutical Companies
• Bad Stats
• Health Scares
• the Media’s MMR Hoax

…. plus several others on various very rich charlatans in the field of alternative medicine and other areas. It also contains a concise and terrible account of the insanity of Thabo Mbeki’s nutty ideas on HIV and AIDS, which killed tens of thousands of people.

The book explains in clear, factual and convincing terms exactly why those suspicions one has about a vast number of dotty and often fraudulent ideas sloshing about are so well-founded. What is amazing is how easily potty ideas are lapped up by the unsuspecting.

Much of the reason for the successful peddling of crackpot ideas, distortions of the truth and downright lies comes down to:

1. people searching blindly for some sort of magical – and especially simple – solution
2. people being overly-impressed by pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo jargon
3. poor reporting by the Media, which has its own agenda and tends to assume that the public cannot understand “science”.

I am particularly interested in the chapters relating to the Media’s handling of science issues and the one on statistics. [On the former, see this article. Ed.] The latter are so important that I now believe EVERYONE should study them, since people will spend their entire lives being bombarded with statistics in support of this or that fad, theory or of course political spin.

To take just one subject: homeopathy, which has millions of believers worldwide. Now, nobody disputes that natural substances can have therapeutic effects on the body, but from this to the creation of a whole edifice of pseudo-science is another matter.  Apparently,  the typical homeopathic dilution is 30C. This means that the original substance has been diluted by one drop in a 100 thirty times. This results in a solution where there is ONE part in

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

… of the healing substance. And apparently, you can buy homeopathic dilutions of 200C and even much higher from any homeopathic supplier. At the dilution of 200C the substance is diluted by vastly more than the number of atoms in the universe. It is obvious that some natural substances can do you good, but the whole basis of homeopathy is clearly shown by Goldacre to be potty. A careful reading of the genesis of this branch of pseudo-medicine is very illuminating.

Which leads on to one of the fundamental issues surrounding this whole area; the causal – or not – links between phenomena. People have a tendency to assume causality where it is not proven. There is a fair bit about this in the book, too – the psychology of perception; the messages we receive and how we interpret them.

I am in awe of this author, who works full-time for the NHS (British National Health Service) and has a website here.

[The book is published by Harper-Collins – ISBN 978-0-00-728487-0 and can be found here. Ed.]

By Chris Snuggs

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