ben goldacre
oracknows | November 19, 2015I didn't think I'd be discussing Dr. David Katz again so soon after the last time. In fact, when blog bud Mark Crislip (who clearly hates me and wants me to pop an aneurysm or have a heart attack, given how often he sends me links to articles as infuriating as this) sent me a link to Dr. Katz's latest article, "Cleaning the House of Medicine", published—where else?—in The Huffington Post, that home for "reputable" quack-friendly bloviation since 2005, when I first read the article, my first reaction was that Katz must surely be trolling supporters of science-based medicine. At first, I wasn't…
tlambert | March 2, 2010Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times:
Dear Tim,
I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you.
Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair…
tlambert | April 11, 2009Ben Goldacre has posted the chapter he was forced to leave out of earlier editions of Bad Science because of a lawsuit from charlatan Matthias Rath:
Although the publishers make a slightly melodramatic fuss about this in the promo material, it is a very serious story about the dangers of pseudoscience, as I hope you'll see, and it was also a pretty unpleasant episode, not just for me, but also for the many other people he's tried to sue, including Medecins Sans Frontieres and more. If you're ever looking for a warning sign that you're on the wrong side of an argument, suing Medecins Sans…
sciencepunk | April 9, 2009
Journalist, doctor, and debunker Ben Goldacre has released the infamous missing chapter from his best-selling book Bad Science. This did not appear in the original edition because it covered the malfeasance of Matthias Rath, who was suing Goldacre for libel at the time. Rath lost his case and consequentially everyone, including Goldacre, is free to discuss how Rath is killing people in South Africa with his claims of curing HIV/Aids with vitamin pills.
Best of all, Goldacre has released the chapter under a Creative Commons licence:
This is an extract from
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre…
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009Today the Big Daddy of bad science journalism, Ben Goldacre, received the advance new-look copies of his fantastically brilliant book, Bad Science. He didn't take well to having his picture in it, either because he is so modest he gets flustered by these things, or because he is in reality several different people engaged in an elaborate ruse the meaning of which we cannot fathom.
Anyway, all his harping inspired me demonstrate just how bad the Bad Science cover redesign could have been. His publishers may, for example, have tried to boost female readership by breaking into the misery-lit…