Review: Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

[Non-fiction – Science 2008]

There is the old cliché ‘some books will change your life’ – this book isn’t one of them. However, this book will change the way that you look at a very significant part of the world, specifically the ‘science’ stories in the media, and the claims made by those that inhabit the fringes of science – such as the pedlars of so-called ‘alternative medicine’.

As Goldacre says:

I would go further, and argue that science itself works very badly as a news story: it is by its very nature a subject for the ’features’ section, because it does not generally move ahead by sudden, epoch-making breakthroughs. It moves ahead by gradually emergent themes and theories, supported by a raft of evidence from a number of different disciplines on a number of different explanatory levels. Yet the media remain obsessed with ‘new breakthroughs’.

I suppose a splendid example of this media attitude to science was the recent, well, hysteria might be slightly too strong a word, but certainly the media coverage of the ‘switching on’ of the Large Hadron Collider’ seemed to be rather over the top. Especially as the LHC exists for a series of experiments that will probably take several years to resolve even the questions the scientists want to ask of the experiments they do, let alone the conclusions they eventually draw from them.

The media does though, distort every story it reports on, often by becoming part of the story itself, not just in science reporting, but throughout the news landscape from politics through, economics to wars, famines and the lost cat and ‘grip and grin’ photos in your local free sheet. An example would be the role of the BBC’s Business editor, Robert Peston is the recent credit crunch ho-ha, as to what extent he was merely reporting, or actually creating, the news stories he was involved in.

Human beings, though, do have a – perhaps innate – predilection for stories, for narrative. Therefore, for the media, if a science story can be shoe-horned into a particular narrative structure, then it stands more chance of getting published. Hence the media’s love of the ‘maverick’ story, where one person stands alone against the prevailing consensus or conventional wisdom. One of these tales told by the media was, of course, that of Andrew Wakefield and his – now totally discredited (not that it had much credibility to begin with) – claim that the MMR jab ‘caused’ autism. It has now become clear that the media’s slipshod reporting of this totally-invented ‘controversy’. (A ‘controversy’ is another of the media’s tropes for turning events into narrative, creating drama between the ‘opposing views’ – sometimes you can sense the disappointment when two people brought onto some news programme fail to disagree dramatically enough for the programme-makers.) The result of this promotion of what was – at best - a non-story about some seriously flawed, if not dubious, research has resulted in the return of measles as a serious threat to public health.

As a medical doctor Goldacre does, in this highly entertaining and thought-provoking book, tend to concentrate on health stories rather than science in general, but then so does the mainstream media. He totally destroys what little credibility those on the fringes of medicine, the ‘alternative therapists’, ‘nutritionists’ , homeopaths and others of that ilk have managed to wangle for themselves, mainly through the media’s over-credulous reporting of their scams and shenanigans. It is for this robust debunking of the charlatans and con-artists (sometimes seemingly even conning themselves as much as their punters) that I regard this book as a must-read for everyone. In fact, it would make sense for doctors to prescribe this book for many of their patients – especially the ‘worried-well’, if only for the way Goldacre shares his fascination for the wondrous delights of the placebo effect. In short, go out and get yourself a copy of this marvellous book and read it as soon as you can. In the meantime, Goldacre’s Bad Science website should be a regular port of call for everyone.