"...the inability of the press and public to evaluate evidence, [Goldacre] argues, has become a public health issue.

Much of the MRSA scare was a circus. MMR was a debacle. Cases of mumps were almost unheard of before the media bandwagon got started, but by 2005, there was an epidemic. The moral is clear: when the well of information is contaminated, people get ill...

The very fact that it has been left to a junior hospital doctor to take the lead in challenging important areas of pseudoscience in modern society reflects the abdication of responsibility by the scientific establishment. This – rather than the role of the media, abject though that has been – is the real lesson of the imbroglio over the MMR vaccine, itself the subject of an excellent chapter in Bad Science.

Senior scientists must take up their responsibility to explain and defend science in public, and to set their own house in order by tackling fraud, exposing junk science and calling a halt to the abuse of university titles and academic qualifications...

The original version of Holford's CV stated that he had graduated in 1976. 1976 left a respectable period during which Holford might have pursued further studies or apprenticed himself to figures whom he lionised before feeling that he was fully prepared to start work in 1980 as a fully independent nutritional therapist, specialising in the field of mental health.

However, as Goldacre points out, there was no such period of grace during which Holford could have worked or studied under supervision while he acquired the requisite knowledge and experience before 1980.

[The CV states that Holford] was at York studying experimental psychology [until] 1976 before studying in America under two researchers in mental health and nutrition (Carl Pfeiffer and Abram Hoffer), and then returning to the UK in 1980 to treat 'mental health patients with nutritional medicine'. In fact...Holford actually [graduated in] 1979, and after getting a 2:2 degree he began his first job, working as a salesman for the supplement-pill company Higher Nature. So he was treating mental health patients in 1980, one year out of this undergraduate degree. [pp. 173-4, Bad Science. Emphasis added.]

Holford has a standard story of his epiphany concerning mental health and nutrition that appears in various publications. Sometimes the details vary a little, but most of them contain some form of the claim that soon after the revelation in the final year of his degree, "Within months I was on a plane to America". From around the 90s, this detail is typically associated with the disclosure that he studied with Drs Pfeiffer and Hoffer.^[i]

Dr Aust offers some interesting background on Holford's mentors and inspirations, including Drs Pfeiffer and Hoffer. One consistently gnawing issue is why Holford directs attention to his period of 'study' with Pfeiffer and Hoffer when neither of them was working in a recognised academic institution at the time^[ii] and would therefore have been unable to offer academic credits or qualifications for whatever length of time Holford spent with them in between graduating, working for Higher Nature and then setting up as a nutritional therapist. One might question whether study is the appropriate word for what may have been a simple visit of what must have been a brief duration.

One might already have some misgivings about how much supervised study Holford was able to cram in, post-graduation and before starting to work as a vitamin-pill salesman, before he started 'treating mental health patients' in 1980, all while researching and writing the Whole Health Manual (originally published in 1981^[iii]) so must have been in preparation during this interesting and somewhat hectic period. Any unease is amplified when one recalls that the Brain Bio Centre information pack (thoughtfully annotated by Holford Myths claims that Holford has been treating patients since the 1970s).

The story becomes even more tangled when one consults Holford's juvenilia in search of enlightenment. It had seemed reasonable to assume that any biographical details written by Holford so soon after his graduation would be more accurate and reliable but biographical inaccuracy seems to have set in at an early age. Browsing through the biographical notes in Holford's 1985 classic, Vitamin Vitality, we learned:

PATRICK HOLFORD started his academic career in the field of psychology. While completing his BSc in Experimental Psychology at the University of York he researched into the effects of nutrition and vitamins on mental illness and was astounded by some of the results, which were often more effective than commonly recommended drug treatments or psychotherapy.

After university, Patrick Holford started to study nutrition and visited all the major nutritional research centres in the United States. He has carried out extensive research into the effects of vitamins and diet on various allergies, athletic performance and premenstrual tension. In 1981 Parick Holford established a nutrition consultancy called Whole Health Programmes. [Emphasis added.]

One wonders what counts as "extensive research" by Holford's standards for the above to be true although some of the research reported in Vitamin Vitality provides some clues). However, in subsequent accounts, Holford claims to have studied mental health and nutrition straight after university so it is conspicuous by its absence from this account of his post-university activities.

Beyond that, however, when did he have the time or resources to visit "all the major nutritional research centres in the United States"? How many centres did he visit? Was he just visiting and observing or working there? How long and frequent were these trips and how did he manage to explain his activities to the Immigration Officers? What did he do at all of these research centres to justify the boundless confidence in his expertise and competence to feel adequately prepared to 'treat mental health patients with nutritional medicine' with no more than a 2:2 in Psychology and some experience as a vitamin-pill salesman for Higher Nature to underpin his knowledge?

Notes

[i] This is easily falsifiable so we pledge that the next time that we are near a national library, we shall plough through a number of the earlier works to check for the first mentions of the time spent studying with Pfeiffer and Hoffer.

[ii] We should clarify that Pfeiffer was working in his own centre in Skillman, New Jersey, not Princeton University, despite the implied designation that Holford uses in several places of 'Princeton Brain Bio Center' or just Princeton.

[iii] The Whole Health Manual was published by Holford's Whole Health Programmes in 1981; it was later reprinted by Thorsons in 1983.

BPSDB

Now, for the sake of argument - or rather actual facts - let's also say that 2,168 of your subjects drop out of your trial. And let's then say that you don't include them in your results. And that of the 832 remaining kids, you only match 629 of them to children who didn't participate in the trial (and thus didn't take the fish oil) to see if they performed better.

Recap: No control. No double blind. No IRB. 60+% of subjects not reported in the results. Comparison group found after the trial had run.

Yes: you are Durham City Council in the UK and that all of the above actually happened this past year and you are guilty of perpetrating  what Ben Goldacre calls 'possibly the greatest example of scientific incompetence documented from a local authority'.

All of which makes me think: is this just an example of municipal incompetence, or is it evidence of a more widespread ignorance about how experimentation can help us construct generalisable knowledge?

You may recall that Durham County Council ran a trial that was not a trial that was intended to boost GCSE scores but not come to any conclusions about the validity of using fish oil capsules to improve academic performance. They have now published their conclusions - based on scrapping their original method of measuring the effect and replacing it with another one based on selected pairs of pupils (I believe this is what is known as "cherry-picking" data).

I am not going to go into any detail on them on this blog because Ben Goldacre has already thoroughly fisked their press release here.

They are not being let off the hook locally either. Paul Thomson, a former Durham headteacher, has been pursuing this matter through the local press, letters to his MP and questions to council members.

He has recently submiited a freedom of information request for:-

1. David Ford's fish oil study plan

2. All e-mails to participating schools (on the DCC extranet)

3. All correspondence between DCC officers and Equazen

4. All minutes and briefing papers from any meetings of members on this subject.

 I hope Mr Thomson starts a blog dedicated to his campaign. I think it would be excellent reading.

Dr Ben Goldacre of badscience.net has posted a summary of the Durham Fish Oil Trials Initiative and the latest update to the saga in which Durham Council has released the data showing spectacularly successful outcomes. Except, it hasn't. Enquiring minds want to know if the data are being held over to be released with a fanfare at the Food for the Brain conference and the session where Dr Madeleine Portwood is scheduled to announce the outcome of the trials initiative.

Durham Council has been fielding a number of Freedom of Information requests related to the initiative. We have previously noted that this has led them to complain about their language being interpreted literally and that this spawned a remarkable mutation in the press release on the topic.

As recently as April, Durham Council responded to a FOIA request by stating that:

I can now confirm and reiterate that there was no contract or formal agreement between Equazen and Durham County Council and/or Dr Madeleine Portwood.

As regards the gifts/services or products given or agreed to, obviously Equazen did supply the capsules to be used in the initiative. However, all unused capsules were to be returned to Equazen on the conclusion of the initiative.

Any collection, collation and analysis of data would be an internal affair for Durham County Council and would not involve Equazen. However, I should reiterate that it was never intended that there would be scientific analysis of the data. All that was being sought was the number of children taking up the offer of capsules and a comparison of GCSE results from the previous year. This information will be published on the Durham County Council website later this year and will be readily available for you to look over.

Call us picky, but does this look like an adequate description of what Durham Council has released?

Initially, just over 3,000 Year 11 pupils began the study, taking the Omega-3 tablets at school and at home.

By the time GCSE examinations came around, 832 pupils had 80 per cent or greater compliance.

Mr Ford and his colleagues then sought to identify the same number of Year 11 pupils who had not taken the supplement and match them to those who had, according to school, gender, prior attainment and social background.

The GCSE results of 629 ‘matched pairs’ – fish oil takers and non-fish oil takers - were then analysed.

“ To reach comparative levels of their attainment prior to the study, we used a nationally accepted system which took into account the results for each pupil at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3,” said Mr Ford.

“ At both stages, the difference in predicted GCSE outcomes between the groups was on average less than three points.

“ However, following the fish oil initiative, the difference in Key Stage 4 (GCSE) results between those who had taken the supplement and those who had not rose to 17.7 points.

“ If there had been no difference in attainment between the two groups, we would be tempted to dismiss the benefits of Omega-3,” said Mr Ford.

“ However there seem to be some very clear indications that pupils taking the supplement do significantly better.”

Mr Ford said the Council made no claim that the results of its GCSE study could be attributed only to Omega-3 supplementation.

A few random observations. That is a more than 70% attrition rate for children who managed to stay the course and take 80% or more of their essential fatty acid capsules over the duration of the project. However, the people analysing the results have not accounted for that by attempting an intention to treat or numbers needed to treat analysis. We have no idea how or why 76% of the capsule compliant children were selected for the match pair assessment. Were the non-compliant children non-compliant from the outset in which case we are comparing two sets of extremes? Or had some of the children taken, say, 75% of the capsules for the duration but they were being compared in this match pairing?

Were the match pairs from comparable schools or from schools involved in the project where the children might have been caught up in the same media excitement, and the Hawthorne Effect of extra attention and high expectation? As Goldacre points out, both in his columns on the topic and in his book, what happened at Durham was the case study for how to maximise the Hawthorne Effect. The sense of expectation and media razzmataz conjured up a modern-day remake of James Stewart's Magic Town set in Durham rather than Grandview. Camera, sound, lighting and technical crews shot B-roll in the classrooms. Famous and/or attractive reporters interviewed children for mainstream media. The parents spoke about their hopes for the initiative; the teachers provided their opinions. Dr Madeleine Portwood and Dave Ford, head of education, described their expectation of positive outcomes.

The sort of set-up will almost certainly produce a false positive result and distort any outcomes. It is unfortunate that this seems to be the standard nutritionism research protocol for any research that involves children, schools and the interest of the media. (You may recall the ludicrously over-hyped work of Patrick Holford and Food for the Brain that was reported so credulously throughout the mainstream media).

For now, we can only speculate about the results until such time as Durham Council or their partners publish them. Publication in an appropriate journal would be the preferred route. One might piously wish that this isn't going to be another example of scientific breakthrough by press release with lots of publicity and excitement and little scrutiny until later - by which time, a more sober interpretation of the actual findings has little to no chance of being reported.

The only way of definitively rehabilitating this zombie is by publication and appropriate scrutiny. Releasing insufficiently detailed press releases is not good enough. Announcing the results at a conference without releasing the data would also not be good enough.

Notes

Our thanks to toastmonster for her permission to use the wonderful zombie fish picture.

BPSDB

There are 2 things that I enjoyed about these episodes and it was not that many alternative medicines get their curative effects primarily due to the Placebo Effect. This is a well established fact, with reams of evidence to support (see below for additional citations).

It is that many of our "traditional" medicines (particularly painkillers and anti-depressants) also get a significant boost from the Placebo Effect. In fact, many anti-depressants have nearly the same effect as a placebo for those with mild depression.

The other thing is that it is often the context in which the placebo is given that informs how pronounced it's effect will be. Simply being administered "sham" acupuncture with no interaction between the acupuncturist and the patient produces a greater response than nothing but performing "sham" acupuncture with an optimal "doctor-patient" interaction has a profound effect on the efficacy of the "sham" acupuncture.

If you've got the time (each episode is about 30 minutes long) they are well worth the listen. For further reading I would suggest the following articles:

• The Placebo Effect by Dr. Steven Novella on Science-based Medicine blog
• placebo effect on The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Why "placebo" is not a dirty word by Robert Burton on Salon.com
• The Mysterious Placebo by John E. Dodes originally published by Skeptical Inquirer

Salon Magazine article reviews Paul Offit's new book and takes a baseball bat to the anti-vaccinationists - A rare case of the popular news media doing their job on this issue. Also I highly recommend listening to this week's episode of The Skeptics Guide To The Universe podcast (40 minutes in) where the Guardian's Ben Goldacre (whose legal victory against the evil quack Matthias Rath I've recently blogged about) talks more about the sordid history of the anti-vaccine movement.

THIS DAY IN GOD:

Yemeni girl who was married off at 8 is now divorced at 10 - Congratulations Nujood, and I hope you enjoy your return to the second grade!

Thixotropy - My favorite new word of the day:

"Thousands of Neapolitans crowded into the city's cathedral on Friday to witness the miracle of Saint Gennaro -- whose dried blood is said to liquefy twice a year, 17 centuries after his death."

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried . . . okay, maybe I could.

Why do we believe impossible things? -

"Wolpert argues that our wide range of beliefs, some of which are clearly false, grew out of a uniquely human trait. Alone in the animal world, humans understand cause and effect, and that, he says, led ultimately to the invention of tools, the rapid rise of sophisticated technology, and of course, beliefs. Even the earliest humans understood that many events that shaped their lives resulted from specific causes. Therefore, there must be a cause behind every event."

Jesus is magic - A look inside the Fellowship of Christian Magicians. No, I'm serious. That's what they actually call themselves.

How to make Fred Phelps & The Westboro Baptist Church go away - Don't worry. It involves dressing up like a pirate:

"Yep, the cuckoo Phelps hate group walked the plank this morning after a happy bunch dressed like pirates and holding signs saying “God hates shrimp — Leviticus” and “God hates cotton-polyester blends” stood opposite them at the corner of Markham and Scott streets. The group, made up of Central Arkansas Pastafarians, waved swords and growled “Arrghh!” in a manner that would have made Abbie Hoffman proud.

With cars honking and waving at the pirates and a TV crew giving them all the attention, the Phelps group — with a child in tow, sadly — picked up their “fag” epithets and went away. Pitiful."

What's Jesus doing on the ceiling? - Hey Jesus, get down from there!

Roger Ebert gives creationism the thumbs up? - This smells of a hoax.

Is the banana man leaving the blogosphere for good? - I doubt it but it'd be a shame to lose him since he's got to be an embarrassment even to other creationists. Ray Comfort preaches to the already converted and isn't likely to convince anyone with his poor debating skills & his arrogant, distasteful schtick that involves bullying random people on the street by trying to humiliate them before a crowd to make himself look good:

ON SKEPTICISM:

Advice on how to avoid being a lonely skeptic

And an appropriate companion piece to this:

Are skeptics too combative?

ATHEIST DENIGRATION:

How are atheists like smokers? - Rev. Keith Crosby from Green Bay, Wisconsin provides the answer to that question with the worst comparison you’ll hear all day:

"Atheists are like smokers. Smokers know that smoking is harmful and yet they smoke while consciously suppressing the fact that harm will come to them if they persist. Atheists act as if their feigned unbelief somehow grants them immunity from responsibility vis-à-vis what politicians in the Watergate era once called “plausible denial.” Plausible denial won’t work with God.

As the passage above indicates, they will concoct theories and create their own little gods and myths including things like earth worship or UFOs … anything to suppress the truth from which they run. They are not fooling God. That’s why atheists get so angry about “religion” and pursue dead ends like “freedom from religion.” They don’t like to be reminded of what is true and the consequences of their self-delusion.

If you are reading this and you are a professing atheist — stop suppressing the truth. Embrace the forgiveness and restoration God in Christ offers."

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Pinning Down The Milky Way's Rotation - "New, very precise measurements have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought. A remarkable result from the most successful ESO instrument HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent 'fall' of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves."

Naphthalene Found In Interstellar Space - "A team of scientists led by researchers from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has succeeded in identifying naphthalene, one of the most complex molecules yet discovered in the interstellar medium. The detection of this molecule suggests that a large number of the key components in prebiotic terrestrial chemistry could have been present in the interstellar matter from which the Solar System was formed."

While we have been running this blog, Holford managed to sell his Health Products for Life business to Biocare (owned by Neutrahealth, who 30% owned by Elder Pharmaceuticals) for £464,000, and currently works as Head of Science and Education at Biocare. We have ethical quibbles about taking money from the pharmaceutical industry - we don't do it - but careers in this industry are competitive, and Holford should be congratulated for getting so much money from Biocare (and thus, indirectly, from Elder Pharmaceuticals).

Holford should also be congratulated for having his application to be a visiting professor at Teesside University approved. Despite the massive - and publicly discussed - errors in Holford's work and inaccuracies in his CV, Teesside were happy to offer him a professorial post. Holford has recently resigned but, given the quality of his work, should have a real sense of achievement that he gained a professorial post in the first place.

Holford's pundit brand equity and reputational resilience are remarkable. Despite ASA rulings against his companies and extensive criticism in the Guardian, Telegraph, Private Eye, Damian Thomson's Counterknowledge book and online, Holford is still widely presented as a nutritional expert by certain parts of the media and he is given prominent platforms to offer his advice (often inaccurate) on a range of serious medical conditions. Despite Holford featuring prominently in a BBC documentary on Lifestyle Nutritionists - with the eminent nutritionist Prof Tom Sanders assessing the poor quality of Holford's research in a way that would leave many of us sobbing in a corner and swearing never to write again - Biocare's Head of Science and Education continues his media and research careers undaunted.

Holford is also founder and CEO of the charity Food for the Brain: this charity has achieved massive media coverage, was planning to work with Teesside University (although it now looks like this won't come to fruition), has 'approved' University catering facilities (step forward Bath and Edinburgh) and is currently advertising for an MSc student. Despite a number of concerns about its research (we spent 10 posts outlining some of the problems with the Report that is its most prominent research output) and its health advice (they modified their advice after HolfordWatch pointed out that it could be harmful to children), Food for the Brain should be congratulated for the fact that it is still going strong. Did I mention that we're talking about the health of (often vulnerable) children here, and that Food for the Brain have carried out - and seem likely to continue carrying out - research on vulnerable children and adults?

Some people have complained that we have been unduly harsh on Holford. However, at this point it's worth quoting Ben Goldacre's Bad Science (p. 160),

If you think I have been overly critical, I would invite you to notice that they win.

Holford is - notwithstanding the fact that his research and advice is riddled with embarrassingly serious errors, and that there have been regulatory rulings against his companies - quite able to work successfully with those in the CAM and pharmaceutical industries, to maintain an impressive media profile, to gain support from various sectors of academia, and to be involved in research on (and offer health advice to) a wide range of people. This is really quite an achievement.

We might be right a higher percentage of the time than Holford but - on media profile and profit - Holford clearly wins. And it won't end here. Despite a number of honourable exceptions, registered dietitians and serious academic nutritionists largely fail to challenge the rise of 'alternative' nutrition: as Goldacre argues in Bad Science (p. 315) those in the 'alternative' health industry now

have almost full spectrum dominance.

If 'nutritionism' has not already been reduced to a type of 'alternative' therapy rather than a serious field of academic research, it soon will be. If 'alternative' nutritionists have not already usurped dietitians as the first point of call when members of the public have questions about nutrition and health, this is going to come pretty soon.

So, why do we carry on? Well, aside from suffering from an unfortunate compulsion to point out when someone is wrong on the Internet, we do have a couple of things in the pipeline - so it will be interesting to see where we stand in another year. At least, we hope we can help to prevent 'alternative' nutrition from winning too quickly.

As 'alternative' nutrition continues to expand - which it will - so does the size of the audience to engage with: if even a small proportion of those who read Holford's sciency health advice in the mainstream media and elsewhere are persuaded to reconsider after reading this site, that will still be a worthwhile achievement.

A final point to note is that, as the 'alternative' nutrition industry goes from strength to strength, it may increasingly attract the attention of critical bloggers, journalists, politicians, academics and dietitians. As recent market events have made reminded us, large organisations can come apart remarkably quickly, especially when their work lacks any solid foundation.

So, once again, our congratulations to Patrick Holford. It will be interesting to see how long this winning streak can last.

It was one of the most important papers to be published this year: only one in five trials on cancer treatment actually gets published; the rest are missing in action. And it gets worse: only 5.9% of industry-sponsored trials on cancer treatment get published.

And as he says, but in those 5.9% "golly did they do well: 75% gave positive results".

Why aren't the majority of trial results being published? Mostly, Goldacre suggests, because the results have been poor and no-one wants to be associated with them. This is obviously a problem: huge swathes of useful (if negative) scientific data are not being released into the public realm. How to combat this?

One suggestion which I bang on about incessantly is that all clinical trials should be registered before they begin: then people stand a chance of noticing if and when a trial goes missing in action."

Which is a nice idea: but who is going to pay for it? And who will chase up the missing trials?

So what do you think? Is a public registry of *all* clinical trials (not just NIH ones) a good idea?

The PR company tried to get Ben to sponsor clearly rigged survey results. He declined sure enough. When the results were posted, and the new "sponsor" pointed out its innacuracy and shoddiness, Ben published a back story. The PR company then shot back that Ben didn't have the whle story. They still haven't got back to Ben to fill him on in the "full development of the story". Ben does have all the original emails though. The only development I can see is they changed their minds from Beyonce to Jessica Alba on whose booty they wanted to say shakes best.

The new leader of the ruling Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni, needs to put together a coalition government in order to become prime minister.

One of the parties she had to schedule coalition negotiations with is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party run by an octogenarian rabbi, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef:

Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef has describ[ed] the Holocaust as God's retribution against the reincarnated souls of Jewish sinners. He said Katrina was punishment for godlessness in New Orleans and U.S. support for the Gaza pullout. And he once said that "walking between two women is like walking between two donkeys or between two camels."

Because that's who you want handling world affairs. It suddenly becomes clear why the Middle East is so chaotic.

2 weeks ago, I posted that RichardDawkins.net has been banned in Turkey by Muslim creationists. Well now those Muslim creationists are trying to explain their side of the story. And well, not surprisingly their justifications suck.

Age of Autism blames MMR vaccines again despite the recent study totally debunking this claim. So what is it, guys? Thimerosal? MMR vaccines that don't include thimerosal? Aluminum? Plastic? Fluoridation? Pick one already!

Also, Kim Stagliano of Age of Autism writes this gem of a blog where she decides once again to avoid providing any evidence that vaccines are not safe to ask, if vaccines are so safe, why does the public have to be constantly told they are safe? Well Kim, you can find the answer to that question by looking at the lying bitch in the mirror.

Lifeway Christian Bookstores is pulling this magazine from its shelves because of something wrong on the cover. Here's a little test of your critical thinking skills. What's wrong with this magazine cover? (aside from the fact that there is an actual magazine called "Gospel Today"):

If you said, “Women pastors?! WHAT?! That’s blasphemy!” then you win!

Testing Near-Death Experiences

Pitfalls in Regulating Physicians - This might explain why Dr. Rashid Buttar is not in jail.

EPIC FAIL!

Age of Autism learns(?) a valuable lesson about libel and that you can't just go around making serious conspiracy accusations about anyone you dislike - Yesterday I posted about Julia Berle's repulsive whining accusations against CBS because they didn't air an episode of the show "The Doctors" which featured her as a guest. Well, Age of Autism has taken down that post and replaced it with a message indicating the 2 major assumptions she made that turned out to be WRONG! I hope Ms. Berle and her fellow AoA goons have learned a valuable lesson about not jumping to paranoid conclusions first. Oh, who am I kidding? They haven't learned a damned thing and will continue their irresponsible and childish behavior. Apparently CBS was pissed at all the calls they received about this, leading AoA to ask its readers:

"Please refrain from any emails or phone calls to CBS about this matter."

My request: Please email and call CBS complaining about the pulling of the show while accusing CBS of being part of the Big Pharma conspiracy. And tell them Age of Autism's Julia Berle and Kim Stagliano sent you.

Avast, me hearties! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrr!!!

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Many New Species Found On Australian Reefs - "Hundreds of new kinds of animal species surprised international researchers systematically exploring waters off two islands on the Great Barrier Reef and a reef off northwestern Australia -- waters long familiar to divers. "

GM Crops Protect Neighbors From Pests? - "A study in northern China indicates that genetically modified cotton, altered to express the insecticide, Bt, not only reduces pest populations among those crops, but also reduces pests among other nearby crops that have not been modified with Bt. These findings could offer promising new ideas for controlling pests and maximizing crop yields in the future."

'Green Gasoline' Converted From Sugar - "Following independent paths of investigation, two research teams are announcing this month that they have successfully converted sugar-potentially derived from agricultural waste and non-food plants-into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a range of other valuable chemicals."

Woo v. Woo - JZ Knight, a New Age charlatan who claims to "channel" a 35,000 year old Atlantean warrior named Ramtha is suing a former student because she dared to cut in on Knight's action based on Ramtha's advice. As PZ Myers says:

"The only thing that could make the trial sillier is if the court put Ramtha on the witness stand."

And here's a very telling excerpt from the article:

Knight's attorneys claim Weaver copied seven school processes, including Fieldwork, an exercise designed to improve ability to focus attention and intuition by finding a symbolic card on a fence while blindfolded.

"Is Pin the Tail on the Donkey focused attention?" Spellman asked Wright.

"It could be," Wright replied.

"So, then is it Fieldwork?" Spellman said.

"No, it's Pin the Tail on the Donkey," Wright said.

And then this:

Kilborne, on cross-examination, was not impressed.

"Isn't it the flat truth that there is no Ramtha?" he asked.

"That is incorrect," said Knight, who hosted a conference of scientists at her school to investigate the Ramtha phenomenon. "And science proved in 1997 that Ramtha was not me."

I knew they had to update those science textbooks!

Woo settles in Woo v. Ben Goldacre - Alt. Med. quack Matthias Rath sued Goldacre for libel and the case has finally settled in Goldacre's favor. Suck it, Rath!

Strike 3 for Andy Schlafly of Conservapædia (not to be confused with that evil, anti-creationist biased Wikipedia) - Twice before, Schlafly has received a sufficient intellectual beating in his crusade against to find some argument to use against Richard Lensky's irrefutable proof for Evolution, but like a good masochist, Schlafly had to come back for yet another pounding . . . which the Editorial Board was happy to give him.

Play the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator - What would your name be had you been born to Sarah Palin?

Was the Large Hadron Collider worth all that money?

How much tuna is too much in one week? - As many of you know, canned tuna contains mercury, which in large quantities can be very dangerous. This article elaborates on how much tuna individuals can consume in a week to avoid going beyond the safe levels of mercury. I also really enjoyed this comment from one of the blog's readers:

"An aside about heavy metals in food: According to ‘The Elements of Murder - A History of Poison‘ by John Emsley, we accumulate so much mercury in our bodies from our environment, that, by most world nutritional regulations for the amount of mercury allowable in meat for consumption, one in every ten people would be unsuitable as food for cannibals."

So maybe exceeding the safe levels of mercury consumption will 1 day save your life.

In yet another beautiful piece of the pot calling the kettle black, after years of attacting Dr. Paul Offit's character and making baseless conspirac accusatons about him, anti-vaxxeers Age of Autism chastize Offit for addressing Robert Kennedy Jr.'s criminal record (presumably in addition to refuting Kennedy's claims though AoA would have us believe that Offit only attacks Kennedy's character and not his claims). Oddly, now they've decided to pretend they've been fair to Offit all along while attacking his character as they deny having attacked his characer. Now that's impressive.

Age of Autism is also promoting "Autism File Magazine," praising it for it's experts and advocates from around the world. So if they're praising it, that can only mean 1 thing, that "the experts" who run the rag embrace the vaccine myth. If it didn't, AoA would be attacking it as viciously as they do Paul Offit, Barack Obama, Amanda Peet, every medical study that's ever proven them wrong, and anyone who publically disagrees with them.

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Miscalculation In Geological Record Uncovered - "The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century . . . It appears that records related to carbonate platforms which are often used throughout the early history of the Earth are not good recorders of the ¹³C/¹²C ratio in the open oceans. Hence, the work presented suggests that assumptions made previously about changes in the ¹³C/¹²C ratios of carbonate sediments in the geological record are incorrect." Even though science once again proves itself to be self-correcting, non-authoritative, and able change its conclusions when shown new evidence, I expect creationists will falsely trumpet this story as further proof of the evil scientist conspiracy to deny god.

DNA 'Tattoos' Link Adult, Daughter Stem Cells - "Using the molecular equivalent of a tattoo on DNA that adult stem cells (ASC) pass to their "daughter" cells in combination with gene expression profiles, University of Utah researchers have identified two early steps in adult stem cell differentiation—the process that determines whether cells will form muscle, neurons, skin, etc., in people and animals."

A large quantity of evidence had been collected by Ben and the Guardian which pointed to the fact that people with HIV had been persuaded to stop using antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and instead use Rath's vitamin and mineral nostrums. As a result people have died. We may never know how many.

Rath's empire is worldwide despite the pretensions of people such as he to be some sort of cottage industry but he prospered particularly in South Africa because the AIDS denialism of President Thabo Mbeki and his Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang resulted in effective drugs being unavailable - leaving the field wide open to quacks and charlatans. Even without Government denialism, ignorance allows quackery to roam free. As I have mentioned before, homeopaths are acting out their healing fantasies in Botswana.

Had the case gone ahead, the court would have heard about Rath's associate Anthony Brink's attempt to have Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign indicted for genocide - because of TAC's campaign for ARVs to be available to all. I doubt Brink ever believed the genocide case was winnable but while it was pending it would help reinforce beliefs about the alleged toxicity and lethality of ARVs.

This attitude exists outside of South Africa, of course. Our very own Patrick Holford has claimed that vitamin C is more effective in treating HIV than ARVs, on the basis of a laboratory-bench experiment wherein vitamin C was squirted onto viruses in a petri dish. And the CAMmers call scientists "reductionist"!

The CAM brigade are fond of anecdotes - so here is mine:

The South African townships are being decimated by AIDS. People are bedridden or dead when they should be at the most productive. Orphans are raised by their grandparents or older siblings. Funerals are a daily event. My sister-in-law has died of this disease. And people like Rath see their suffering as an opportunity to make money.

The ongoing libel case had forced Ben Goldacre and Fourth Estate to remove the section on Rath's activities from his book but now he is free to write about them - and apparantly has so much material that he can write a whole book on Rath and AIDS superstitions. Isn't that nice?

[South African] 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 while promoting his vitamin pills in South Africa, a country where hundreds of thousands die every year from Aids under an HIV denialist president and the population is ripe for miracle cures. I said his actions were highly worrying, in no uncertain terms. I believe I was right to do so.

Link - full article - Bad Science blog - loads of other bad science claims exposed

LINK - Fall of the doctor who said his vitamins would cure Aids by Sarah Boseley, health editor The Guardian

LINK - Dr Rath Health Foundation [Matthias Rath]

LINK - Wikipedia Matthias Rath

LINK - Wikipedia article by Dr Rath Health Foundation

UPDATE - 14.9.08
LINK - Speaking gigs this week in London, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday..

I'm a dedicated follower of Ben Goldacre's column in the Guardian, and of his blog, and have been since right around the time he first started to dig his teeth into Gillian McKeith (it still makes me very angry to be shelving books by her where her name is preceded by "Dr" when I know that Goldacre purchased the same "doctorate" as she has online, and not even for himself, bit for his dead cat - to highlight how little fact-checking was done before the "title" was awarded). I read him every week in print, and follow the blog and rss feed since I like keeping abreast of the new charlatanism and his battles against it. 

The most important battle he's had has not been against TV nutritionists, but against a man who kept life-saving ARV (anti retroviral) drugs out of the hands of millions of HIV+ South Africans. That man is Matthias Rath, a "vitamin therapist" who gleefuly played into the denial (HIV is not a virus, it's a disease of poverty) and drug-phobia (Pharmaceuticals are bad, traditional, herbal based medicine is good) of the SA government by claiming his vitamins could cure HIV (prior to landing in SA in 2004 Rath had popped up all over the place, claiming to be able to cure cancer with his vitmains - this is the kind of opportunist shark we're talking about).

Thabo Mbeki proved dangerously susceptible to his claims, and it was only direct action by people like Zackie Achmat (pushing for generic drugs by importing them himself, agitiating for public education about the realities of HIV and famously, calling the health minister a murderer for blocking access to ARVs) that have put any pressure on him to change his mind. Numerous arrests and a legal battle with Rath - who has made millions out of telling the government what they want to hear while people die needlessly have not slowed Achmat down, but rather have drawn international attention to him and the group he founded (the TAC), and more importantly to the plight of the HIV+ who are the ultimate casualties. 

Goldacre ran a piece in the Guardian on the situation, and ran a detailed exposé of the type of "medicine" proffered by Rath (i.e. nothing useful packaged as a miracle cure, your standard snake oil stuff) and was immediately hit (both himself personally and the Guardian) with a libel suit. Rath (as is his standard operating procedure) was seeking damages and a retraction. Goldacre was forced to re-edit his book, removing a chapter on Rath, and had to defend his own research and the Guardian's right to publish it in court.

Guess what? After the court heard testimony from several witnesses (ranging from people working for the Treatment Action Campaign, to counsellors and relatives of people who had died on Rath's "treatment plan", the case was so obviously a lost cause that the snake-oil merchant had to drop it! And Rath has to use some of his ill-gotten gains to pay damages (possibly up to 500k sterling). As if a victory against a shyster like didn't bring enough happy to my morning, the Guardian printed a brilliant editorial about the case here. You can also read todays article by Ben (plus a lot more) on the Bad Science Website here. Check it out. You won't be sorry. And buy Ben's book too, it's brilliant.

Dr Ben Goldacre was on BBC 1's One Show. Watch out for it on BBC iPlayer for September 8 (from 8:10 to 12:00 or thereabouts if you crave the added wisdom of Len Goodman). [Update, please use the iPlayer link if you can because this tells the BBC that you were interested in the Bad Science segment. For those who can't, or for when it disappears, there is a YouTube.]

In an action-packed segment that serves as a lively precis of his book, Goldacre admonished the media for their poor science coverage and then took the viewer on a rapid tour of the Media Hall of Shame for Science Reporting and Obsession with Miracle Cures.

We learned that Dr Andrew Wakefield's research would not have had such a profound influence had it not been for the ready echo-chamber of a credulous media and some inept handling by the medical authorities and their corduroyed antediluvian representatives. MMR was treated as an opportunity to attack the government and the NHS rather than as a topic that deserved appropriate coverage by specialist reporters.

Goldacre even made up some special topic boards for the ever-entertaining Daily Mail just to illustrate its particular flip-flopping on what might cause or prevent cancer depending on the date and the press release. One example was red wine which, in different stories, either prevented cancer or caused it: sadly, these pieces were even by the same journalist, Kate Devlin.

[caption id="attachment_1468" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Tom Sanders BBC One Show September 8 2008 tells us about spoon benders - his term for nutritionists"][/caption]Goldacre visited an open-air market with vegetables and fruit especially primped, polished and looking full of virtue and vitamins. We heard a nicely succinct message on the benefits of eating said virtuous foods and riding your bike and ignoring the over-complicated nonsense that passes for nutritionism. Cram-packed though the segment was, there was a short contribution from Il Fabuloso and Pithy Remarker In Chief, Professor Tom Sanders, who deadpanned superbly as he introduced us to a new term for nutritional therapists:

Spoon benders. They make it up as they go along. They promote the use of supplements quite often where supplements are totally unnecessary.

Watch it. There is much to learn and to amuse - both of which are A Good Thing. If you want to learn or laugh more, take a look through the book: Bad Science or browse through the website badscience.net.

BPSDB

I'll start with the one criticism I have of the book; the final sentence of the introduction which reads:-

And if, by the end, you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong but with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now."

Frankly, this grates. To me it comes across as arrogant which is a great shame as the book is anything but. It might have been best to omit it. Anyway, enough of the slightly disappointing starter and onto the meat.

The book starts with the detox industry and in particular the scams such as the Aqua Detox Foot Bath where the alleged detox process actually creates the "toxins" supposedly drawn from the body. This can be demonstrated by keeping your feet out of the bath during the "detoxification" process. The bath fills up with crap anyway. I built my own using two PP3 batteries in series for a power supply, two three inch nails as electrodes and a mug of water with a tablespoonful of salt stirred in for the bath. Within a minute it was full of greenish-brown stuff.

I have gone into detail on this point for a reason. This book is more than a "point-and-laugh" directed at the alties. It shows that with a little knowledge and thinking skill we can see through the scams and apalling media coverage of science for ourselves - and proceeds to equip us with those skills. I think the modish word is "empowering".

Ben Goldacre goes on to analyse the claims of pill-pushers such as Patrick Holford, homeopaths, Durham County Council and the drug companies. The first two may present themselves as alternative and "holistic" but in fact their philosophy of convincing us we need pills to get through everyday life is every bit as disempowering (and based on  reductionist data) as the drug companies. There is an outline of the placebo effect and how the cultural expectations of an intervention can effect the outcome.

The last two chapters cover the MRSA hoax perpetrated by "Doctor" Chris Malyszewicz from his garden shed (remember the "Mop of Death" and similar headlines? That was him. There is MRSA in some British hospitals but these over-the-top stories stopped when Malyszewicz died in a car crash.) and the MMR debacle which demonsrated that the media are now a danger to public health.

Both these stories show  the inadequacies of modern journalism. Malyszewicz was known to "always find positives" when testing for MRSA. It never occurred to any journalist other than Ben Goldacre that the real story was not "our hospitals are plague zones" but why Malyszewicz found MRSA where real microbiologists working in real laboratories did not.

The problem is that far too many generalist journalists do not understand how science works - they think it is competing pronouncements from authority figures. They do not appear to even understand what it means for there to be evidence in support of a statement. They are also totally wedded to a narrative of "lone crusader versus the Establishment". They used the format with Malyszewicz and ran with it in the Wakefield-MMR-autism saga long past the point where it was remotely credible. They called for "more research" but when it was done and showed that the fears were unfounded, they ignored it.

Ben Goldacre concludes by pointing out what we can do. He appears to think (probably correctly IMHO) that the print media and TV are not going to change. He suggests that we email editors and point out errors in any rubbish reporting that comes to our attention. We can report dodgy adverts to the Advertising Standards Authority. And we can blog. We can dissect bad science where we find it and publicise good science ignored by the traditional media. Newspapers and television have largely failed in reporting science. It is down to us to do what we can to remedy that failure.

"In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes".

This well worn saying has been quoted and misquoted in hundreds of different ways in the forty years since Warhol first coined it [1].

Bad Scientist Ben Goldacre, in his keynote speech* at Science Blogging (sciblog) 2008, highlighted one of these deliberate misquotes, which he attributed to NTK.net (Need To Know: Britain's most sarcastic high-tech weekly newsletter). It goes a little something like this:

"On the internet everybody can be world famous for fifteen people".

This wonderful expression captures the nature and scale of science blogging on the internet today in a nutshell. Personally, I think it also sums up much of the spirit of the Science Blogging 2008 conference as well. In total, around eight groups of fifteen people, attended the conference. It was physically impossible to talk to all of them in one day, especially since I had to slink off early at 7pm, but I did manage to meet the following people:

Fifteen random people I've never met before

Fifteen people I've never met before (virtually or actually), nice to meet you all!

1. Martin Robbins of leyscience.net
2. Jeff Marlow, rocket scientist, starting PhD at Caltech working on the next mission to Mars (wow!). Currently working at Imperial College London (and absorbing soccer football culture - but has given up on understanding cricket - I don't blame you mate!)
3. Scott Kier, Royal Society, who hosted an enjoyable and lively unconference session "bored of blogging: how to keep motivated"
4. Jenny Beard British Association for the Advancement of Science, see the Fantastic Big Question web site, e.g. Will the LHC in CERN create a black hole, and why should we NOT be worried about it? Ian Mulvany isn't convinced
5. Ed Yong Cancer Research UK, not exactly a rocket scientist, see European genes mirror european geography
6. Prateek Buch, University College London Genetics / clinical trials, is he obsessed with penises? Probably, aren't all blokes obsessed with the size of their manhood?
7. Hungarian biologist Victor Poór who draws funny cartoons
8. Edinburgh ecat? electronic laboratory notebook bloke whose exact name and software I've forgotten. Damn.
9. Coracle (takes his name from a gene/protein he worked on in fruit flies), when he is away from the bench he hangs around at badscience.net
10. Marco Boscolo, Bologna, Italy XML is his DJ
11. Biologist-cum-statistician Bob O'Hara, who looks nothing like the cat shown in his profile picture.
12. Government bods from DIUS, must have been Mike Rose? probably and Steph Gray definitely, see DIUS sciblog report. I liked the demo of how to embed funky DIUS widgets in your website (techie note to self: WordPress strips out <script> tags so I can't embed widgets here. Doh!
13. Hilary Spencer(?), Nature New York, she must be the person responsible for sanity checking submissions for managing the development of Nature Precedings
14. Victor Henning, who works on Mendeley which helps you to "manage, share and discover academic knowledge".
15. Bronwen Dekker, who works on Nature Protocols, see picture of the Dekkers (who kindly obliged my very amateur photography)
    

Fifteen people I met in person (at last!)

Fifteen people I finally met in person, having virtually "met" online by reading their publications, blog posts or through email contact.

1. Raf Aerts (Raffa), Tropical Ecologist, had an interesting chat with him about the Ethiopian mountains, where he does his field work, home to the bone-dropping Lammergayers. Makes me wish I'd never given up field work.
2. Alexsander Griekspoor, who now works on Mekentosj.com and "Papers" full-time
3. Henry Gee, the croc-wearing phenomenon and sciblographer
4. Richard P. Grant (RPG), University of Sydney, (Note to self: find out how he convinced his department heads to pay for his round-the-world trip!). Not to be confused with RPG or Richard E. Grant (women tell me the latter isn't as sexy)
5. Roland Krause, finally we meet for real to take notes from the biomass
6. Graham Steel, Journal of Visualised Experiments (JOVE) blogger (we are all scientists now) I think we have the same sense of humour. Must be a Scottish thing, I'm sure I've got some scottish in me somewhere (not just in my name). While I don't have a visible ginger gene, I sometimes get tingles down my spine when I hear bagpipes. Also, after several pints of Deuchars IPA, I can even sound like I'm scottish too. Och aye! Does that make me Scottish?
7. Maxine Clark, Nature editor extraordinaire "the world needs more editors"! (not scientists?)
8. Heather Etchevers, France, who is wondering what to do with all her conference notes
9. Chemist and informatician Egon Willighagen, see his sciblog report
10. Li Kim Lee, runs Nature Network London
11. Matt Brown, runs Nature Network London and organised a scientific pub crawl in London town. Mr. Barman, I'd like five pints of your finest beer science, preferably the bitter English variety, not the fizzy American or continental european stuff.
12. Brian Clegg who came out with one of my favourite quotes from the conference, "there aren't too many scientists in the world, there are too many biologists. What the world needs is more physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers etc" - or words to that effect. Discuss. He also argues that Scientists alone aren't enough to communicate science to the general public. Hmmmm.
13. Jennifer Rohn, partly responsible for lablit.com when she's not pondering the celebrity geek phenomenon
14. Martin Fenner, see his His Paper Writing Dream Machine version 1.0
15. Matt Wood, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute informatics-type. I'm glad somebody likes my impact factor boxing joke. Ha ha, where's the punchline? I'm looking forward to seeing the Sanger bioinformatics demo up at Amazon Web Services (with hadoop) sometime soon and hopefully attending Bar Camp in Cambridge (BarCamb) next year, which Matt organises.

Fifteen people I've met before

Fifteen people I've met before, good to catch up

1. Euan Adie, Nature (but no relation to Kate), he has seen the future and its bakeable, pass me the futuristic cheesey snacks Euan!
2. Scintillator Alf Eaton, Nature, hublogger and hubmedder
3. Ian Mulvany, Nature, responsible for connotea (Ian, Alf, Euan: thanks for the free lunch!)
4. Timo Hannay, Nature, manages all the webby people.
5. Chemist Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
6. Chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. We are looking forward to your gig in Manchester tomorrow.
7. Aussie Chemist Cameron Neylon, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and University of Southampton, blogs at OpenWetWare
8. Mind Hacker Vaughan Bell, who helped me understand the crucial differences between the Royal Society and the Royal Institution (I'll tell you later). He's off to Colombia, not Columbia the University in North America , but Colombia the country in South America (it sounds very similar in spoken language). Bon voyage, Vaughan.
9. The totally zen Mike Barton, busy releasing bioinformatics survey results (under a CC-BY license of course)
10. Anna Kushnir, Nature (but not a big fan of PubMed). You and me both.
11. Corie Lok, Nature, organises Nature Network Boston
12. Attila Csordas, who likes the "equalising" effect of blogging. Oh yes indeed.
    
13. Andrew Walkingshaw, see his talk on Linked data and scientific publishing, is the "linked data" bandwagon just a rebadged and repackaged semantic web? I dunno. Discuss.
14. Oh b*ggeration! (imaginary friend 1)...
15. ...I can't quite fill this list to fifteen (imaginary friend 2)

Fifteen people I didn't meet

Fifteen people I didn't get the chance to speak to, maybe next time. So many people, so little time...

1. Marc West, a podcaster responsible for the Mr. Science Show
2. Ben Goldacre, medic and journalist, I've got a stack of nerdy questions about badscience.net and big bad pharma that will have to wait for another time
3. Simon Frantz, one of the people behind the nobelprize.org website
   
4. Clare Dudman Keeper of the snails, did a great session on creativity
5. Gia Millinovich so how come we rarely see you and your hubby Professor Brian Cox in Manchester?
6. Those Digital Curation Centre (DCC) people (Martin Donnelly?) look interesting, eg. Digital Curation Blog: How to make repositories a killer app for scientists.
7. Professor David Colquhoun FRS. One of a handful of Professors (of Science) with a blog, and I'm pretty sure the only Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) with a blog.
8. Aussie journalist Zoë Corbyn from Times Higher Education, didn't get the chance to hassle her about writing that myexperiment news article soon.
9. David Bradley of Science Base
10. Oliver Obst head of the medical library of the University of Munster, see Science Blogging 2008 London: Nachmittag (Ja!)
    
11. Gavin Bell, Nature, hand held blogger
12. Charlotte Stoddart, podcaster (or should that be "podder"?), see her podcasting Ben Goldacre here
13. Simon Hughes, British Library
14. Dr Aust who likes to vent his spleen
15. Brain Duck who is trying to understand uncertainty blogs over at brainduck.wordpress.com

Actually there are a lot more than fifteen people I'd like to meet, there is the other sixty as well.

Fifteen Science Professors blogging?

Phew! That's four groups of fifteen people, around half the total conference attendance. A very interdisciplinary bunch, just like leafing through a copy of Nature, you get genetics on one page, climate change on the next followed by missions to Mars to wrap it all up. I think this is something special that makes Nature and Nature Network unique.

The striking thing is, with a few exceptions, most conference attendees, nature networkers and bloggers are relatively young. Why don't more senior scientists blog? This is a challenge Timo Hannay and PMR posed at the end of the conference, "get more senior scientists blogging". There is a BIG prize up for grabs, an all expenses paid trip to the next Science Foo Camp (scifoo) in the Googleplex, California (August 2009). Details to be posted online soon. Maybe this will mean science blogging 2009 will have fifteen senior Professors in the audience?

And finally, if you are one of the ~ fifteen (or so) people subscribed to and reading this O'Really? blog, thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy my random ramblings, I certainly enjoy writing them. For any Professors out there reading this (I know a few that do), when will you start blogging? Now, blogging is no substitute for peer-review, but it certainly fills some of the gaping holes that traditional scientific publishing leaves in the web. What are you waiting for?

References

1. Andy Warhol (1968) (volume released to mark his exhibition in Stockholm, February–March, 1968) "Warhol, Andy" The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online.
2. Journal of the Hyperlinked Organisation (JOHO) famous to fifteen people
3. Wikipedia: Fifteen minutes of fame
4. Discussion on this post over at friendfeed and on nature network too.
5. Pop Stars? Nein Danke! In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people..., thanks to Heather Etchevers

* A video of Ben Goldacre's talk should be available online soon.

(Creative Commons licensed picture of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, "stolen" from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) New York by oddsock)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

E probabilmente lo è, sia una provocazione che una contraddizione. Ma è anche una verità su consumi distorti, esigenze artificiali, soluzioni di comodo davanti ai problemi della vita ed in quanto tale vi invito a leggere l'estratto da Bad Science di Ben Goldacre, medico, divulgatore per sè, per il Guardian e per BBC, nonchè giovane blogger inglese dalla scrittura brillante e dal piglio salace (e forse anche con gli stessi inevitabili difetti - delirio di grandezza, anyone?) di Michael Moore e Beppe Grillo. Da qualche tempo cerca di fare luce critica sulle reciproche e spesso nefaste relazioni tra sostrato sociale, economia, scienza, pubblicità, semiotica, cattivo giornalismo, consumi relativamente al concetto di well-being.

Bad Science's Ben Goldacre has done a two-parter for BBC Radio 4 about the placebo effect. They make a really accessible description of what the effect is (in part 1) and what its implications - practical and ethical - are (in part 2).

EDIT: and Ben's got a newer post about hotel housekeepers that might show another, quite fascinating, placebo effect in action.

As my handwave for the content and themes of the programmes, the Shapiros gave an excellent overview of the history of medicine and placebo:

It is a mystery how a treatment used since antiquity was unknown, unnamed, and unidentified until recently. It is even more remarkable because this is the only treatment common to all societies and cultures. When we examine the long history of medicine, it is the only common denominator between the Egyptian physician who prescribed crocodile dung and the modern physician who prescribes penicillin. Moreover, its effectiveness has been attested to, without exception, for more than two millennia.
One of the many secrets enshrouding this remarkable treatment is that when its effectiveness wanes, it metamorphoses into a new, seemingly different, and culturally more appropriate form of effective treatment-somewhat as bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics. Trousseau (1833) discerned this covert mischievousness in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he urged healers to hurry and use new drugs while they still worked. [Shapiro AK, Shapiro E. 1997. The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician.]

It is clear that a healing response in patients seems to be enhanced by confidence in the doctor/healing figure and a meaningful theatrical ritual (whether physician, herbalist or shaman, depending upon history or culture, as Goldacre's discussion of Quesalid indicates). Dr Houston wrote: “the placebo has always been the norm of medical practice” and suggested that, doctors themselves:

were the therapeutic agent by which cures were effected. Their therapeutic procedures, whether they were inert or whether they were dangerous, were placebos, symbols by which their patients' faith and their own was sustained. [Houston WR (1938). Doctor himself as therapeutic agent. Annals of Internal Medicine, 11, 1416–1425.]

Houston's description may seem a little hyperbolic but it seems to be borne out by the many interesting studies, experiments and anecdotes that Goldacre reports in the programmes. What the doctor says, how the doctor behaves and what the doctor believes, all have an effect on healing. This probably explains why, despite some of the ethical issues associated with the use of placebo, the placebo is still in use in clinical practice. At the beginning of 2008, Sherman and Hickner^[1] announced that the placebo is still in (occasional) use among academic physicians in Chicago. 45% reported that they had used it to calm a patient or as supplemental treatment. Only 12% thought that placebo use in routine medical care should be prohibited.

Goldacre discussed ethical issues surrounding the use of placebo in Part 2. Sir Ian Chalmers has a long-standing interest in the evidence underpinning healthcare. He explored the notion that full information about the administration of placebos in a trial may have a downside for patients as well as advantages. Chalmers gave the example of a trial in which some participants were warned that the active drug might cause stomach upsets as part of the side-effects. When the results were analysed, more patients who received the placebo but had been warned about the stomach upsets reported this side-effect than those who took the drug or were not warned (it was slightly unclear).

Goldacre explored whether there is an ethical dilemma if honesty, transparency and fully informed consent mitigate against the use of placebo but thereby deny patients some of the most effective therapeutic techniques and diminish the full effectiveness of treatments. Goldacre stated his own distaste at the notion of deception but explored whether it was possible "to provoke placebo researchers into justifying mild deception, overstating the benefits of a treatment, perhaps, or underplaying the potential risks".

None of the placebo researchers considered that deceiving a patient could be justified and considered that the long-term damage to the relationship of trust with medicine would outweigh any short-term advantage to the patient. Various clinicians discussed a form of words that allowed them to present the facts about a placebo treatment to patients. Goldacre wondered whether medicine was prevented from exploiting placebo by knowledge of the efficacy and quantification of treatment effects and concerns for patient autonomy, but CAM practitioners were less inhibited because their interventions had not been disproven, so there were notionally free to present their therapy in reassuring terms and perhaps exaggerate its expected efficacy, which, paradoxically, might provide a degree of confidence, authoritativeness and reassurance that is more effective for patients. A slightly convoluted argument for 'ignorance is bliss if it gives you plausible deniability for your recommendations'.

Professor George Lewith is a researcher and practises both CAM and medicine. When Goldacre presented this idea to him, Lewith argued that a lack of funding for CAM in the UK makes it an evidence-free zone, and so, when it is offered, it is mostly done so on the basis of a practitioner's prior experience that such interventions have been helpful. Lewith argued that that might be an example of a placebo effect but, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is a legitimate use of it. Goldacre demurred that when doctors try to enhance the effect of a treatment that they recommend, they do so with a knowledge that there is an evidence-base to support their recommendations but Lewith countered that that is no