Category Archives: health

Guardian: Man flu and the difference between mice and men

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Ben Goldacre: "what if the media was no longer the public's key source of information on health? The NHS Choices website gets about 6 million unique visitors a month, with no publicity. There you will find Behind the Headlines (around 200,000 visitors), a service I played a tiny role in helping set up: they take the biggest health news stories each day, find the real scientific evidence behind them, and precis it, clearly, for a lay audience. What's amazing is that there is a need for this service."

Jeni Barnett: MMR and Me (updated)

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Jeni Barnett's defense of the MMR programme that is the focus of a legal dispute between LBC and Dr Ben Goldacre. To her credit, she allows those who disagree with her to comment.

Update 9/2: It seems my pleasant surprise at Barnett's willingness to engage with her critics was premature. As Holford Watch points out, the critical comments have now been removed from her site.

Barnett also added second, more snarky post condemning Ben Goldacre as a "Bad Scientist". The (quite reasonable) comments on that post have also been removed.

If you publish non-fiction in any public medium — be it a blog or something with a considerably larger audience like a radio programme — you must expect people to question the factual veracity of your reporting and the logical consistency of your analysis. If this happens, you should be willing to take it on the chin, defend your position, or even honourably withdraw claims that don't stand up to the critique.

This is the standard that scientists hold themselves to, and it would be nice if those with the power to disseminate ideas to mass audiences would hold themselves to the same standard.

Alone In The Dark: Strange Ontology: Week Beginning 8th October 2008

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A Daily Mail watch-blog looks at Ben Goldacre's observation that the Mail is "engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer."

Alone In The Dark: Strange Ontology: Week Beginning 8th October 2008

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A Daily Mail watch-blog looks at Ben Goldacre's observation that the Mail is "engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer."

Press Gazette: Doctor’s warning: ‘Poor quality of British journalism is a serious public health issue’

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"In an interview for this month’s print edition of Press Gazette, [Ben] Goldacre has condemned journalists for fueling what he calls the “MMR hoax” by giving widespread coverage to Doctor Andrew Wakefield’s claims that MMR jabs caused autism. He points out that vaccination rates have dropped from 92 per cent to 73 per cent prompting serious disease outbreaks since Wakefield’s research was first reported in 1998."

Guardian: Editorial: Libel battles can make and break reputations, but only rarely do they bear on questions of life and death

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"Libel battles can make and break reputations, but only rarely do they bear on questions of life and death. The legal case against the Guardian which Matthias Rath abandoned this week is an exception. The vitamin campaigner - who has long proffered his pills as a panacea in defiance of all evidence - objected to remarks our columnist Ben Goldacre made about his South African activities."