Product Description The informative and witty expose of the "bad science" we are all subjected to, called "one of the essential reads of the year" by New Scientist.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, and via multiple health scares and miracle cures - we are constantly bombarded with inaccurate, contradictory, and sometimes even misleading information. Until now. Ben Goldacre masterfully dismantles the questionable 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. Review "For sheer savagery, the illusion-destroying, joyous attack on the self-regarding, know-nothing orthodoxies of the modern middle classes, Bad Science can not be beaten. You'll laugh your head off, then throw all those expensive health foods in the bin." - The Observer (U.K.)"One of the essential reads of the year." - New Scientist"If you were to pick up just one non-fiction book this year, you'd do well to make it this one." - Daily Mail"Thousands of books are enjoyable; many are enlightening; only a very few will ever rate as necessary to social health. This is one of them." - The Independent"It should be on the national curriculum."- Time Out (five stars) About the Author BEN GOLDACRE is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies, and quacks. He has written a weekly "Bad Science" column in the Guardian since 2003, and has made acclaimed documentaries for BBC Radio, including "The Placebo Effect" and "The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists." Trained in Oxford and London, with brief forays into academia, he is thirty-five and works full-time as a medical doctor in London. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1MATTER Ispend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me-I would go so far as to say that it’s my favorite leisure activity-and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands, or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes, and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people “science” is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method. Dismantling our early, more outrageous pseudoscientific claims is an excellent way to learn the basics of science, partly because science is largely about disproving theories, but also because the lack of scientific knowledge among miracle cure artistes, marketers, and journalists gives us some very simple ideas to test. Their knowledge of science is rudimentary, so as well as making basic errors of reasoning, they rely on notions like magnetism, oxygen, water, “energy,” and toxins-ideas from high school-level science and all very much within the realm of kitchen chemistry. DETOX AND THE THEATER OF GOOSince you’ll want your first experiment to be authentically messy, we’ll start with detox. Detox footbaths have been promoted uncritically in some very embarrassing articles in the New York Daily News, the Telegraph, the Mirror, The Sunday Times (London), GQ magazine, and various TV shows. Here is a taster from the New York Daily News: it’s a story about Ally Shapiro, a fourteen-year-old who went to a “detox” center run by Roni DeLuz, author of 21 Pounds in 21 Days: The Martha’s Vineyard Diet. “The first day I did it,” says Shapiro, “the water was completely black by the end.” By day three, twenty minutes in

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