Aids Quackery International Tour
Ben Goldacre The Guardian Saturday December 1 2007 If you were going to be actuarial about media coverage – an eighth of a column inch for each premature death perhaps – then this paper would be filled...
View ArticleWashing the numbers, selling the model
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday January 26 2008 If there’s one thing I love, it’s academics who take on the work of investigative journalism, because they are dogged. This has been a bad week for...
View ArticlePep, zing, oomph, ker-ching. CoQ10.
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday March 15 2008 Doctors love pills: so do the public, and the media, and of course so do pill companies. When one pill dies, another must take its place. Are you...
View ArticleRadio 4 The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists
Well, very excitingly – to me – the first half of my two-parter on Radio 4 went out over the airwaves last night. You can listen to it here: Part 2 is here. It’s Radio 4′s “Choice of the Day” for...
View ArticleThe trial that never was.
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday March 29 2008 And so an epic saga comes to a close. You will remember the Durham Fish Oil tale – don’t switch off now, the punchline’s funny. The county council said...
View ArticleMy unfashionable views on regulating nonsense
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday April 19 2008 Paranormal phenomena are on the rise this spring, as any viewer of Street Psychic, Most Haunted Live, The Psychic Detective, Psychic Investigators,...
View Article“Manufacturing Doubt”: Sir Cliff Richard weighs in on the Cochrane review.
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday April 26 2008 And so our ongoing project to learn about evidence through nonsense enters its sixth improbable year. This week, the assembled celebrity community and...
View ArticleDore – the media’s miracle cure for dyslexia
How do you judge if an intervention is effective when you hear about it in the media? Perhaps you tot up the balance of opinions. Perhaps you do it unconsciously. You might have noticed the Dore...
View ArticleBlogs vs mainstream media
Ben Goldacre The Guardian, Saturday May 31 2008 You will remember last week we were talking about the £2,000 Dore “miracle cure” for dyslexia, invented by paint entrepreneur Wynford Dore. It had been...
View ArticleThe Charities Commission think blogs have no educational value
Rant. Podnosh has unearthed a true gem: in a document called Public Benefit and the Advancement of Education, the Charities Commission are puzzling over whether educational institutions like posh...
View ArticleOhh look I’m on the One Show on BBC One
Slightly tiggerish and lacking in gravitas but that’s roughly what you’d expect from a 12 year old delivering a 100,000 word thesis on mainstream television in 3 minutes....
View ArticleMatthias Rath drops his million pound legal case against me and the Guardian.
It’s just been publicly announced that the vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath has pulled out of his gruelling legal case against me and the Guardian. He bought full page adverts denouncing Aids drugs...
View ArticleGenerous review of my book in the Daily Telegraph
There’s a very nice review of my book “Bad Science” in the Telegraph this week. I have to say I’m delighted to see that the two newspapers I’ve probably been meanest about over recent years are the two...
View ArticleBad Science teaching resources for schools
A couple of years ago I made a bunch of school resources for teachers with the organisation NESTA and a group of teachers. Since I mentioned them in the book a couple of people have asked for them, so...
View ArticleHot foul air
Ben Goldacre The Guardian Saturday 1st November 2008 Guy Ritchie has cancelled Madonna’s order for tens of thousands of pounds worth of special Kabbalah water to fill their swimming pool. It’s always...
View ArticleEr, “help”. Legal Chill from LBC 97.3 and “Global Radio” over Jeni Barnett’s...
[Update: recent developments are now available here, including an EDM in parliament and discussion in mainstream media] [Update: links to transcripts and audio hosted elsewhere at bottom of post] One...
View ArticleLBC, MMR, Jeni Barnett, an Early Day Motion, the Times, and, er, a bit of...
I thought since a few days have passed that I should let you know what’s happening with the slightly ridiculous LBC situation. If you skip to the bottom you will find a discussion on some mischievous...
View ArticleMatthias Rath – steal this chapter
This is the “missing chapter” about vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath. Sadly I was unable to write about him at the time that book was initially published, as he was suing my ass in the High Court....
View Article“We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine”
Ben Goldacre The Guardian Wednesday 29 July 2009 Today the Australian magazine Cosmos, along with a vast number of other blogs and publications, reprinted an article by Simon Singh, in slightly tweaked...
View ArticleFish oil in the Observer: the return of a $2bn friend
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 5 June 2010 “Fish oil helps schoolchildren to concentrate” was the headline in the Observer. Regular readers will remember the omega-3 fish oil pill issue, as the...
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