to be a little in love with Ben Goldacre?

[entropyglitter]

Just read 'bad science' (finally) and I think I am in love.....

my favourite bit was Gillian McKeith thinking that oxygen (generated by chlorophyll) in your gut is not only plausible, but at all a good idea....

presumably this is at the same time as main lining anti-oxidants (which had been shown to increase your risk of disease rather than decrease it).

Having bad hair or smoking doesn't actually affect the quality (or otherwise) of someone's opinions or arguments.

Yes - criticisms of people like Ben Goldacre so often descend into ad hominem attacks. I suppose its forgivable on this thread as it started with a pro hominem premise of lovability.

Very good point Grimma -we were discussing the reasonableness of being in love with him, so saying he is smug or smelly or unattractive is perfectly relevant to the question.

YABU.

I haven't read his book and I have no intention of doing so. I think he is untrustworthy to the extreme because he has consistently got rather important facts wrong about the concerns with MMR. This has been pointed out to him many times by people directly involved with the children in the 1998 Lancet paper. And yet he continues to tout his incorrect version as fact. And he wins journo prizes for doing so.

Propaganda, much?

(And he is patronising and sexist and narrow thinking and has undeclared conflicts of interest.)

I find it very sheep like all this fawning over him and his book. Just my opinion, sorry to spoil the love in.

Beachcomber- "I haven't read the book but I know it's rubbish"

TBH, most of the book is about sample sizes, statistical significance, controls etc; basically giving you the tools to interpret data (as presented by the media) for yourself. What's not to like?

i knew him at college. he's very nice.

Beachcomber, if you read the book you would probably find yourself able to argue your cause more effectively. That sounds terribly patronising, but isn't meant to be: it helped me no end, because I (like most people) am not terribly research-literate and my main form of evaluating research findings was whether I trusted the people they came from. Now I know better.

Please elaborate on the conflict of interest.

And condemning a book unread is usually a mistake- at the very least it detracts from your case.

And please list the facts he has got wrong. He deals, as far as I can see with interpretation of data and analysis of scientific method.

Whoa! I cant believe I had never seen that Tim Minchin poem/song thing before. It is AMAZING.

Beachcomber As the Minchin song indicates the difference between me and you is that I am willing to change my mind if new evidence arrives. Please feel free to facilitate this by sending me whatever evidence it is you think demonstrates that MMR is dangerous/linked to autism.

The history of my view point on MMR looks something like:
step 1. Believe all vaccines are safe coz doctors wouldnt use them if they werent. (this is hopelessly naive and very sheeple indeed).

step 2. Hear about Wakefields work and become very worried. (because I would expect that, firstly someone would need to be very certain indeed that a vaccine was dangerous to risk the lives of all the children suddenly not getting the vaccine and secondly that journalists would have to be very accurate in their reporting or face the consequences - these are also both hopelessly naive also and just a different sort of sheeple).

step 3. Look at the research paper and the evidence the claim was based on and become utterly horrified that anyone extrapolated anything about the safety of MMR from the data collected. (this is using my own training as a scientist - not relying on anyone elses opinions, and the flaws that I could spot were only the most obvious ones.)

step 4. look at the evidence for the measles virus being found in vaccinated children. This is difficult because half of it is referred to but not published and the other half of it has been retracted by the authors. (That an author would not publish their findings or retract a paper is a very serious issue. Many scientist have stood by their work when threatened with anything from funding cuts to legal action to death threats. That the die hard adherents of the MMR is dangerous camp would retract there own data seems a very clear indication that they think they were wrong.)

Step 5. Find the Cochrane collaboration review on the topic which considers all of the information ever published on a topic (including Wakefields) and which states that there is no credible evidence of a link between MMR and autism. (The reason for trusting the Cochrane report is that it is all there. Every trial, every thought on why a trial does not represent a fair test and is not included. You might think it is sheeple to believe the information in a Cochrane review but the only other option is to look at the 139 studies and critically assess them myself, and my day job would not allow that.)

Step 6. Read 'Bad Science' and discover a whole swath of other ways in which a medical trial can be flawed beyond the obvious ones I saw in step 3 and which have helped me understand just why some of the reasons that trials are found to be invalid in step 5. are important.

So do please provide me the means to move onto step 7. You need first to demonstrate why the Cochrane review itself is flawed and then to produce evidence that data you have access to is itself of an unimpeachable standard.

I look forward to hearing from you.

What gets me is that he works in psychiatry, the most anti-scientific of all the medical fields and yet he's never turned his critical gaze on that as far as I know.

I am not a scientist, but I bought 'How to read a paper' after a mention in that book and will demand my daughters read it.

I'm not saying his book is rubbish - it must be very good because so many people like it. I'm just saying that I won't buy it or read it because I find BG's actions in one very controversial area to be odd and rather dubious. That's all.

The CoI that I refer to is quite complicated but I'll have a go at elaborating without going on for too long. Don't want to turn this thread into an MMR debate - these are the facts as far as I am aware of them.

BG has connections with the Institute of Psychiatry - so far so normal, his area of study was psychiatry.

However the Institute of Psychiatry and notably key member Michael Rutter have quite strong opinions/published major studies on ASD. Rutter also published one of the infamous (major) studies declaring there to be no epidemiological justification for any more research into potential MMR/ASD links. This study is very very controversial for reasons it would take me many paragraphs to go into here - the very fact that it was an epidemiological study was controversial in itself.

I don't think it is right for BG to never mention his connections to Rutter and the IoP - neither are without bias when it comes to this particular medical controversy.

Even worse, IMO though is the fact that BG's father is public health professor Prof Michael J Goldacre. Prof Goldacre was director of the UK Department Health funded Unit of Healthcare Epidemiology (he may still be, I don't know).

Goldacre senior was a co-author of a study of the effects of GlaxoSmithKline?s Urabe strain version of MMR - the vaccine that had to be withdrawn from public use in 1992. The Unit of Healthcare Epidemiology has produced several MMR related studies. Many of them very controversial.

No matter what one thinks of the whole MMR debate, it is not very honest of BG to pretend that he is just any old journo, with a background in medicine, with regards to this issue. Neither is is honest of him to present his opinion as unbiased fact to the British public.

As to things he persistently gets wrong about the whole affair - I would have to relook them up. I can't remember them all offhand. One of the main ones though is that he (and now much of the public) criticise the Lancet paper, which started off the whole controversy, for 'not having controls'. This is;

a) plain wrong - the report did have controls (and it isn't very long so easy enough to read and find this out)

b) not much of a criticism anyway as the Lancet paper was a case study designed to argue the case for bigger studies with higher numbers/controls, etc. That they included controls in the Lancet case study was actually going beyond what a case report of this nature would generally do. The main authors have stated that they did this because they thought the issue was important enough and controversial enough to attract criticisms of 'no controls' so they pre-empted by including controls.

All that is probably as clear as mud!

I just think Ben Goldacre is not at all impartial when it comes to this particular issue. Which is a bit ironic really

Just want to repeat - I have no opinion of his book. Can't possibly can I as I have never read it.

I just don't want to read it because I think its author has shown himself to not be honest with regards to a major medical controversy.

I don't trust him so I don't want to read his book. Too bad for me if I am missing out on a really good reading experience.

oh lol.

Specific AND convincing!

With a special commendation for managing to spin out "lalalalala, I can't hear you" (eyes closed/fingers in ears) to 17 paras over 2 posts.

Bruxeur it seems to be you going "la, la, la I can't hear you". Beachcomber has pointed out some clear problems with apparent conflicts of interest that Goldacre has.

If he's a professional journalist, he should understand why those are important and be open about them.

Gnah. Sucked in by two TINY points.

BG is a psychiatrist. It wasn't just "his area of study", it's what he does. Would be frankly concerning if he DIDN'T have "some links" with the IoP.

re his dad - you think the Goldacres have some kind of hillbilly feud going with the Wakefields? Did it start over a goat?

And also - I am not saying that Goldacre is right or wrong when it comes to MMR.

I'm saying that he has connections that make him not impartial.

Which of course is pretty much the case for everyone involved in this thing. I just don't like that fact that he bangs on about impartial science, whilst having a huge potential for bias himself, that he fails to declare, with regards to something he writes prolifically about, and influences public opinion on.

As I say - I don't want to turn this into an MMR debate. The issue with BG is not whether there is a problem with MMR or not. That is irrelevant.

I had some tinfoil here just a moment ago. And now it's gone.

Bizarre.

I already said that it is entirely normal for Goldacre to be a member of the IoP.

It just means that he has a horse in this race whilst pretending to be a bystander.

That's all.

He doesn't mention any links with psychiatry on his About page on his blog. It's quite odd to leave out his profession, either current or previous, don't you think?

Has anybody managed to find a scientific paper that Goldacre published after 1997 yet?

Almost 12' there was, and now it's gone

:(

He claims to be an academic working in epdemiology now. He's doing well because most academics do have to have some kind of a research track record before they get their positions.

Bruxeur you're just being personally abusive. In a sneaky kind of way. :)

Please can you stop.