Ben Goldacre

‘Bad Science’ hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science, becoming a 400,000 copy bestseller. Now Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess. Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry. Patients are harmed in huge numbers. Ben Goldacre is Britain’s finest writer on the science behind medicine, and ‘Bad Pharma’ is a clear and witty attack, showing exactly how the science has been distorted, how our systems have been broken, and how easy it would be to fix them.

Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Dr. Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us. In his own words, “the tricks and distortions documented in these pages are beautiful, intricate, and fascinating in their details.” With Goldacre’s characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.

How do we know if a treatment works, or if something causes cancer? Can the claims of homeopaths ever be as true—or as interesting—as the improbable research into the placebo effect? Who created the MMR hoax? Do journalists understand science? Why do we seek scientific explanations for social, personal and political problems? Are alternative therapists and the pharmaceutical companies really so different, or do they just use the same old tricks to sell different types of pill? We are obsessed with our health. And yet—from the media's "world-expert microbiologist" with a mail-order Ph.D. in his garden shed laboratory, via multiple health scares and miracle cures, to the million-pound trial that Durham Council now denies ever existed—we are constantly bombarded with inaccurate, contradictory and sometimes even misleading information. Until now. Ben Goldacre masterfully dismantles the dodgy science behind some of the great drug trials, court cases and missed opportunities of our time, but he also goes further: out of the bullshit, he shows us the fascinating story of how we know what we know, and gives us the tools to uncover bad science for ourselves.

The very best journalism from one of Britain's most admired and outspoken science writers, author of the bestselling Bad Science and Bad Pharma. In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In Bad Pharma, he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wittiest, most indignant and most fearless commentators on the worlds of medicine and science is collected in one volume.

מדע רע, רב-המכר השנון של בֶּן גוֹלְדֵייקֶר, חושף את האמת מאחורי רופאים שרלטנים, סטטיסטיקות מטעות, עיתונאים מפיצי-אימה וחברות תרופות ציניות. מאז 2003 הוא חושף מידע מדעי מפוקפק, ולעיתים מוטעה לחלוטין, בטור הפופולרי שלו בגרדיאן. בספר פוקח-העיניים הזה הוא חושף את האמת מאחורי פרסומי קוסמטיקה מטעים, ויטמינים חסרי תועלת, הומאופתיה, ניקויי רעלים למיניהם, ועוד. ובינתיים, החתולה (המתה!) שלו מקבלת תעודת תזונאי מורשה, בובת ברבי זוכה לניקוי רעלים, ו"מומחים מחזיקי-דוקטורטים-בהתכתבות" נחשפים. גולדייקר לוקח אותנו למסע, לעיתים מצחיק ולעיתים מדכא, מטריד וחשוב מאין כמוהו לחשיפת המדע הרע שאנו נחשפים אליו מדי יום, ולחשיפת הרמאים והשרלטנים שמפיצים אותו.