Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 5

The ethical standards of the “Ethical Standards in Health and Life Sciences Group”

Still catching up on posting things from this year. Here’s a piece I wrote in the BMJ with medical student colleagues about an extraordinary, influential, and rather depressing organisation called the “Ethical Standards in Health and Life Sciences Group”. This was a committee of the great and good in medicine, co-chaired by Sir Richard Thompson […]

RandomiseMe: our fun new website that lets anyone design and run a randomised controlled trial.

Catching up and blogging this year’s activities: here’s a fun website I made with my friend Carl Reynolds, fellow doctor behind NHS HackDays (where nerds who love the NHS build useful tools). RandomiseMe lets you design and run randomised controlled trials, either on yourself, or on your friends. You can do a trial to see if your […]

We should teach epidemiology in schools.

Just catching up with posting things from this year, here’s an editorial in The Lancet from Paul Fine, Andy Haines and me. We argue that epidemiology is the unsung hidden hand, whose techniques underpin a huge chunk of our causal reasoning about the world. It has helped to guide technical specialties like economics, but it’s […]

Bicycle Helmets and the law: a perfect teaching case for epidemiology.

Hi all, I haven’t posted much on badscience.net due to exciting home events, fun dayjob activity, a ton of behind-the-scenes work on trials transparency with alltrials.net, activity on policy RCTs, exciting websites, and a zillion talks.  I’m going to post this year’s backlog over the next week or two (and maybe rejig the site if […]

Why – and how – I wrote Bad Pharma

This is my piece for Waterstones Book Club, where I was asked to write about why – and how – I wrote Bad Pharma. The full book club caboodle is here, and you can buy the book here. Here it is… ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I wrote this book because we need to fix a set of problems […]

I totally just walked past a tube advert for my book.

You might not find this as weird as I do, but I totally just walked past a tube advert for my book. SO: there’s a lovely new edition of Bad Pharma out this month, with a spanking extra chapter about all the bad things that naughty people like the ABPI and EFPIA have done in […]

New super cheap edition of Bad Pharma, with extra chapter, and: Waterstones Book Club!

RIGHT. Sorry to be absent, I’m back from outer space. NOW. There’s a new cheap edition of Bad Pharma out this month, with a new and very long extra chapter on everything that’s happened since the first edition came out. There are goodies and baddies galore, I’ll be writing about it all over the next few […]

Head-to-Head with PhRMA on transparency in the BMJ

This week in the BMJ there’s a head-to-head on trials transparency between me and PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry representative body in the US. My article is here, PhRMA’s is here, both articles are open access for one week (since it was press released, them’s the rules at the BMJ…) but mine is open access forever, [...]

Discussing AllTrials on the BBC Daily Politics today

I’m on the BBC2 show Daily Politics today at 12:40pm with Grant Shapps and Andy Burnham, discussing the alltrials.net campaign, and the problem of trial results being withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients. Here’s a brief film they made on the subject. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22957195 In case there’s any doubt on the evidence, here’s my evidence to [...]

Here’s me and Fiona Godlee (BMJ) giving evidence to Public Accounts Committee on withheld Tamiflu trials

In December last year a group of MPs including Sarah Wollaston, David Davis, Julian Huppert and Adam Afriyie wrote to Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, asking for an inquiry into Tamiflu. Specifically, they asked about the way that vitally important information on clinical trials around Tamiflu have been withheld from doctors and [...]