Bad Science: Ben Goldacre at Imagining the Future of Medicine

As part of its mission to promote access to the arts and sciences, the Royal Albert Hall hosted an historic event on Monday 21 April 2014, curating a spectacular and provocative programme of talks from world experts celebrating innovation, imagination, inspiration and their passion for a better future in health and medicine.

Hosted by Irish comedian and presenter Dara Ó Briain with special guest and TEDMED curator Jay Walker, Imagining the Future of Medicine also featured a performance from The Kaos Signing Choir for Deaf & Hearing Children.

Speaker bio

Ben Goldacre, former TED and TEDMED speaker, is a doctor, academic, campaigner and bad science writer whose work focuses on uses and misuses of science and statistics. He is the founder of the All Trials campaign and a keen advocate for clinical transparency.

[bigbenhebdomadarius]

Dr. Goldacre is not a "bad science writer, " he is a good science writer who writes about bad science.

[sasakelly]

honourable professional thank you for enlighten us

[brushstroke]

A drug rep came to my pharmacy from abbvie today. He told us that generic drugs don't work and all of my coworkers ate it up. Just like pharmacists to indiscriminately absorb information for a bit of overpaid regurgitation later.

[kristopherdonnelly]

The cultural blind spot is partially performance mindset. Also potentiated by performance mindset lol

Also the FBI obviously. The FBI also potentiates "mistakes"because they produce boundaries in communication to increase controllability. Also the CEOS, managers, etc... produce boundaries in communication to increase controllability, which you can basically read about as explicitly the strategy in use in Edward Bernays Propaganda but also it's pretty proven that the more division that one of the best ways to increase influence within an organization is to find isolated social networks and make yourself the common node lol

[yodaknight]

Ben Goldacre is outstanding at one thing it seems: providing excellent answers to poor questions. 

Goldacre seems more interested in intellectualising medicine, abstracting it, and in discussing and promulgating ideas on how to treat symptoms for diseases - rather than in preventative medicine - i.e. actually helping people, society and getting to the root causes of problems. 

Statins are a perfect example. Do people **need** to take statins? Or drugs for regulating blood sugar level? The answer is a resounding no. For probably at least 95% of cases, the symptoms that these drugs seek to resolve can be more adequately resolved if people adopted a healthy lifestyle - exercise, excellent nutrition, and stress reduction. Not only would this remedy the symptoms - it would get to their root cause, and also result in many additional health benefits. 

I can't believe that people actually buy into the myth that Ben Goldacre is a voice of reason and rational thinking in modern medicine. 

Whilst Ben Goldacre side-tracks society's attention down the wrong path of trying to get the medicalisation of medicine 'right', I urge you to pay a little more respect and admiration to doctors and health care professionals all around the world who are nuanced enough to realise the urgent need to get to the root causes of health problems, rather than skirting around the edges in an academic fog of detached naivety. 

If you want to look at my critique of Ben Goldacre's writings on healthcare, here it is:

[kristopherdonnelly]

We're working on very similar problems. Organizational psychology is very important, so is propaganda, which you happen to have knowledge of both. Don't let them tell you so and so has the skill sets and some bullshit about responsibility and things being interconnected, negative consequences, nonsense to cover up, same thing they do to fuck the president