Deception in science
British scientists have establishedGoldakr B. Deception in Science. – M.: Eksmo, 2010.
Sofya Sapozhnikova, "Time of News"
On your website badscience.net Dr. Ben Goldacre sells badges and souvenir textiles: bibs with a warning about the safety of vaccinations, underpants and T-shirts with images of a rubber duck, for some reason symbolizing a nutritionist – one of the favorite targets of Goldacre's caustic criticism.
For about ten years in a row, Goldacre has been using the same email address to collect evidence of medical ignorance, maintains a blog, and also keeps an archive of his scientific column in the Guardian newspaper.
Goldacre is a typical British scientist, as we imagine him to be, the owner of a Stern skate, an expert in his field and an ideological colleague of the fashionable cook J. Oliver (whose programs he often sets as an example to specialists in healthy nutrition). Goldacre is in a lively abusive correspondence with the British Ministry of Education, prominent homeopaths and manufacturers of dietary supplements (the owners of billions of dietary supplements as regularly as in vain bombard the Guardian editorial office with lawsuits). To create his revealing articles, he uses the most extravagant methods. For example, during a journalistic investigation, he enters his dead cat into the American Association of Dietitians (the association was not interested in the diploma of the deceased).
Published in the publishing house "Eksmo" Goldacre's book in English is called the same as his website. Pseudoscience, bad science, in the author's presentation is extremely similar to the mythology described by Roland Barthes, with the only difference that this cultural phenomenon affects not only the consciousness, but also directly the well-being of its consumer.
Pseudoscience is authoritarian and incomprehensible to an outsider. Its priests share with the public the secrets of harmony and longevity, making it extremely difficult for everyone to follow the rules of a healthy lifestyle. Those whom Goldacre calls charlatans create a market for themselves – their clients, along with money, lose their sense of reality. No one prevents one of the largest dealers of dietary supplements from claiming that due to environmental problems, modern oranges do not contain vitamin C. And consumers are starting to slowly believe that a pill is easier than an orange.
Pseudoscience arises where incompetent journalists (Goldacre reproaches humanitarians writing to newspapers who do not want to delve even into the basics of chemistry and mathematics) indiscriminately reprint press releases of those who need to sell something. Goldacre personally destroys many of the showbiz aesculapians working on British TV. A whole chapter of "Deception" is dedicated to nutritionist J. McKeith, whose book "You are what you Eat" was published in Russia without much fuss a few years ago.
At best, the inability to evaluate medical news will turn into a waste of extra money on a widely advertised cream. A voluntary luxury tax, as Goldacre calls it, and on the next page gives a recipe for a moisturizer that everyone can make at home. The composition of the pharmacy cream differs from it very little, and it is better to ask about the difference in cost in the marketing department.
It is worse when patients suffering from serious illnesses go to healers and shamans (although Goldacre writes with great inspiration about the strange but undeniable placebo effect) or whole countries persistently use dietary supplements to treat AIDS (the investigation of the tragic consequences of South Africa's health policy occupies a large chapter in the "Deception"). Medicine in the West is the sphere of serious money. Mythical science radically changes the worldview, leaving a person without a critical apparatus, without the ability to analyze and defend himself.
The problem with true medicine is that it is difficult to popularize it. It develops according to laws in which the press lacks drama. Sensational hypotheses have a nasty way of not being confirmed, and liquids in laboratory test tubes, as a rule, do not play with rainbow colors. Apparently, the "golden age" of medical discoveries has passed. The main revolutionary drugs and techniques were discovered in the middle of the twentieth century, and today pharmaceutical companies are engaged in the production of generic analogues of existing drugs, struggling with side effects (or trying to earn extra money). Therefore, there is no place for exclamation marks in an accurate scientific article.
The publication of "Deception in Science" in Russian perfectly illustrates the furious revelations of Ben Goldacre. Starting with the cover (a collection of stereotypes), decorated with mysterious and irrelevant formulas, a portrait of a suspicious person in blue gloves and the inscription "Eureka". The translation of a witty, evil and fascinating text is replete with obscuring constructions; the name of the newspaper in which the main character works is written in three different ways; instead of the "New Age" that has successfully become entrenched in Russian, the "New Era doctrine" appears. To top it all off, there is no scientific editor in the output of the book, which makes many chemical, pharmacological and statistical details worth rechecking once again.
On the other hand, it is quite understandable why it is not easy for Russian publishers to work with "Deception": it seems that in a country that has been digesting the Petrik filter for months, the question of science is quite different. From here, Goldacre's Britain looks like an amazing world, where the showdown between a journalist and the largest pharmaceutical companies takes place in court, and the latter do not always win. Where patients receive detailed information about the course of treatment and make responsible decisions about their fate. Where consumers are protected from direct advertising of medicines and only people with medical education can withstand the onslaught of drug propaganda. Where there are endless trials and studies.
From chapter to chapter, Goldacre unobtrusively slips the reader another device from the tools of evidence-based medicine. Rendomization, systematic review, meta–analysis or blind method - these clearly described techniques turn out to be clear ways for the reader to distinguish truth from lies and ultimately find a way to prolong and improve human life. The world that Goldacre writes about is a world of beautiful and harmonious scientific thought, a world logically knowable. With all the conditionality of this tool, logic allows you to describe, calculate and know beauty, without canceling the complexity of the world order. You don't have to agree that with the ardor of a naturalist, Goldacre gives preference to the theory of photosynthesis over theology. This book is written mainly about doubt, the basic skill necessary for intellectual survival.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru31.03.2010