Bad Science
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.
When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.'
Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. This book will be about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments – from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads. This book will help people to quantify their instincts – that a lot of the so-called 'science' which appears in the media and in advertising is just wrong or misleading. It will be satirical and amusing – exposing the ridiculous – but it will also provide the reader with the facts they need.
Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldacre is the acerbic quackbuster who's a thorn in the side of celebrity nutritionists and alternative medicine practitioners in Britain through his "Bad Science" column in the Guardian. And now this M.D. and formidable investigative journalist brings his eye-popping insistence on rigorous science to this side of the Atlantic. There's plenty to debunk, like the detox footbaths that turn brown whether your feet are in them or not. Or the homeopathic remedies that are no more effective than placebos (i.e., sugar pills). Goldacre's on to Big Pharma as well, skewering the industry's manipulation of statistics and suppression of negative results in clinical trials. The media take their hits as well for fueling the scare over the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine's link to autism a link that researchers have definitively debunked. And there's hell to pay for the growing legion of nutritionists and the lucrative nutritional supplement business, which come under Goldacre's special derision as "The Nonsense Du Jour" and "intellectual crimes." Not that Goldacre's always so solemn or scolding. His ongoing battle with Brit nutritionist Gillian McKeith is both unsettling and an amusing illustration of how simple it is to pull back the curtain on the wizard of Oz.
