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Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks Ben Goldacre. New York: Faber and Faber, 2010. 288 pp. $15.00
There is little science and big science and also good science and bad science: very bad, distorting, dissimulating, misleading, and fraudulent science: skin treatments, homeopathy, supplements*-all advocated for by legitimate, serious, perhaps even well- intentioned scholars, doctors, and marketing people who cause waste and distress and real physical, emotional, and financial harm. Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor and author who has written an extremely popular account debunking the very things in which his ostensible audience places its faith. He gears his work to the lowest common denominator, at times condescending intellectually. For example, he overexplains in great detail, offering innumerable examples of the placebo effect. Even if one had been unable to distinguish a placebo from an arroya, the description of two or three simple clinical trials would have adequately clarified matters. But I will presume here that virtually every serious reader of this book has at least a working knowledge of placebos. (He fails to mention the research that indicates that the placebo effect is a myth; he too has his sacred cows.) The bottom line seems to be that more concise articulation would not have produced a 300 page diatribe, one that conceivably could have become a bestseller.
Goldacre allocates chapter after chapter to debunking various pseudoscientific scams that charlatans but also true...