Busy bee today, sorry for the late link, the second part of the BBC Radio 4 two-part series “The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists” is going out at 8pm this evening, presented by yours truly (part one here) and produced by the excellently sharp Rami Tzabar from the BBC Radio Science Unit. I think it’s rather good, and makes a single clear point: lifestyle is important, and we all want to improve our health, but the evidence on diet and health is not sufficient to justify the very specific and confident advice which we crave, and which some will sell to Read the rest of this entry »

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 it was doing a “trial” of fish oil pills in children, but the trial was designed so that it couldn’t possibly give useful information - not least because it had no placebo group - and was very likely to give a false positive result. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday September 22 2007

So you will remember the fish oil pill stories of last year. For the new kids: pill company Equazen and Durham Council said they were doing a trial on them with their GCSE year, but it wasn’t really a proper trial, for example there was no control group, and they had lots of similarly dodgy “trials” dotted about, which were being pimped successfully to the media as “positive”. When asked, Durham refused to release the detailed information you would expect from a proper piece of research. Even now, for all this pretending, there still has never been a single controlled trial, even a cheap one, of omega-3 fish oil supplements in normal children. Ridiculously.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Saturday March 17, 2007
The Guardian

In the pharmaceutical industry there are people called “drug reps“, who travel around doctors trying to “educate” them about their products. They actively foster an ignorance of scientific methodology, and much of what you get taught in medical school is about how to spot their complex fluffs. Luckily, when pill peddlers market directly at consumers, the fluffs are much simpler. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very much looking forward to this important press release, of a study in 4 children, making massive international news. The experiment is part of the promotional activity for another omega-3 pill called VegEPA, and a Channel Five documentary on children and diet to be broadcast later this week: it is unpublished, and this time the study, amazingly, was funded by the TV production company Endemol. They love these stories so much, they’ve started paying for the research. This represents a really interesting new development in the interplay between commercial companies making seductive claims about pills solving complex social problems, and the media who love them. They’ll be giving out their own degrees next.

For more on the dangers of making great leaps of faith on the real world abilities of a treatment using a theoretical surrogate outcome, I’d always recommend reading the excellent Trisha Greenhalgh, here on “Evidence and Marketing”:

www.bmj.com/archive/7106/7106ed.htm

This is taken from her book “How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine”, a highly Read the rest of this entry »

Read more on “Professor Patrick Holford” here, there, here, there, here and here.

Ben Goldacre
Saturday January 6, 2007
The Guardian

It’s just not cool to anonymously edit your own Wikipedia page. It’s an online encyclopaedia, free to access, a tribute to the powers of the hive mind, and anyone can edit any page. This makes it a valuable resource in the hands of those who know its limitations, but it has certain vulnerabilities, certain rules, and certain moral codes. It’s even less cool to get your hip young PR agent to anonymously edit your Wikipedia page for you.

Patrick Holford is a self styled “nutritionist”, and probably the second most famous of the bunch: flattered on ITV last night, starring on GMTV next Wednesday, feted by the media. He writes plausible, reference-laden, sciencey-looking books, and is used as an “authority”. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t let me distract you from the important work in the other fish post, but you might have missed this from the current affairs monthly Viz, which was pointed out to me in the senior common room today: Read the rest of this entry »

Hahahaha, well the struggle to get meaningful scientific information out of Madeleine Portwood et al in Durham regarding her famous positive fish oil “trials” continues. To me this is very simple. They talk about positive trial data, at length, for a long time, in the media. We want to see it. Portwood is eager to go on telly and talk about her positive findings to journalists, but the information behind the claims is somehow less forthcoming.

Pasted below is the rejection that a couple of hundred of you have had. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Saturday November 11, 2006
The Guardian

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried using the Freedom of Information Act: it’s an excellent trouble making tool, and you do feel quite James Bond, but the act has its flaws. One being that if you ask for too much, as one lone, obsessive, disproportionately pedantic science columnist, they turn you down on grounds of cost. Quite spuriously and unfairly, to my mind. So now I’m offering a kind of skills swap: I’ll teach you all how to do an FoI request (it’s easy) if you help me get a bunch of data.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t plan your day around it or anything but there is a v v v big fish thing on Radio 4’s You And Yours tomorrow, 30 minutes, focussing on the shenanigans about the trial, no wait, initiative, no, study, we’re measuring, well, we’re, yes, hang on yes we’re measuring results, no, hang on… in Durham.

It should be pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Listen here:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/items/01/2006_43_thu.shtml