[b]Ben Goldacre
Torture the data, and it will confess to anything…[/b]
Not unlike people.
You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Someone cue Mr. Objectivist.
Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.
How nefarious!
Sham ultrasound is beneficial for dental pain, placebo operations have been shown to be beneficial in knee pain (the surgeon just makes fake keyhole surgery holes in the side and mucks about for a bit as if he’s doing something useful), and placebo operations have even been shown to improve angina.
Where shall we take this?
[b]Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:
"I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?
Anton", 2006
Thank you Anton.[/b]
We need something like that too. Not counting the Kids of course.
…there is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries…
You know, if you were born a sucker.