Ordinary Gweilo

I highly recommend Ben Goldacre’s website Bad Science and his column in The Guardian.  He is a (medical) doctor, and has taken it upon himself to expose quackery and the appallingly sloppy way that science is reported in newspapers and on TV.  He does it effectively and entertainingly.  A good place to start is his Self-indulgent retrospective – 2007:

Nobody listens to a word I say: I’ve been saying it for so long now that I think I’d be sorry if they did. Scaremongering season kicked off with the Panorama WiFi special. Among its many crimes against sense, this program featured “independent testing” by – oh, hang on – a campaigner against WiFi, who also sells his own brand of special protective equipment to those frightened about WiFi. The BBC have since upheld complaints. Immediately after the show was broadcast, the Independent were promoting elaborate quack devices to protect against WiFi: these will take off in 2008.

The media’s MMR hoax – as it will come to be known – was kept alive on the Observer’s front page; the Independent cried “suppressed cancer report shows GM link to potatoes” about a research paper which didn’t mention the word “cancer” (not once!); and the scattergun scaremongering of the Daily Mail peaked when they demanded the banning of a chemical which had, rather brilliantly, already been banned.

Combatants in the drug war continued to chip away at their own credibility. The Independent on Sunday repeatedly announced that cannabis is 25 times stronger than before (in fact average potency has doubled). That was followed with “cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis”. Then the MHRA pushed a scare about “nitrous oxide” claiming that “the ‘rush’ users experience is caused by starving the brain of oxygen” (it’s a drug which acts on the opioid and NMDA neuroreceptor systems).

I’ve enjoyed his pieces on homeopathy and of course he has had fun at the expense of "Dr" Gillian McKeith:

In the face of all this, the homeopaths’ melodramatic whining about some kind of special vendetta against them looks pretty weak. Of course this year marked the rebranding of Dr Gillian McKeith PhD as a pantomime figure rather than an academic expert, but the wider project of deliberately overcomplicating diet in order to create a new profession called “nutritionists” – and thus paradoxically disempower us all – went so far that by christmas, the media were cheerfully pushing chocolate and booze as health foods, on account of their antioxidant content.

Worth reading.