Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

The simple theme running through all these products is that you can hoodwink your body, when in reality there are finely tuned ‘homeostatic’ mechanisms, huge, elaborate systems with feedback and measuring devices, constantly calibrating and recalibrating the amounts of various different chemical constituents being sent to different parts of your body. If anything, interfering with that system is likely to have the opposite of the simplistic effects claimed.

Just like the National Lottery, the cosmetics industry is playing on people’s dreams, and people are free to waste their money.

I can very happily view posh cosmetics—and other forms of quackery—as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don’t understand science properly.

But it’s not entirely morally neutral. Firstly, the manufacturers of these products sell shortcuts to smokers and the obese; they sell the idea that a healthy body can be attained by using expensive potions, rather than simple old-fashioned exercise and eating your greens. This is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science.

But just as homeopathy has unexpected benefits, so it can have unexpected side-effects. Believing in things which have no evidence carries its own corrosive intellectual side-effects, just as prescribing a pill in itself carries risks: it medicalises problems, as we will see, it can reinforce destructive beliefs about illness, and it can promote the idea that a pill is an appropriate response to a social problem, or a modest viral illness.

Once again, the human body is cleverer than anybody you know.

Rightly or wrongly, finding out that something doesn’t work probably isn’t going to win you a Nobel Prize—there’s