Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

by Ben Goldacre

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept.

Because it has no scientific meaning, detox is much better understood as a cultural product. Like the best pseudoscientific inventions, it deliberately blends useful common sense with outlandish, medicalized fantasy.

In general, you don’t absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable.

As Voltaire said, “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

Why is evidence so complicated? Why do we need all these clever tricks, these special research paradigms? The answer is easy: the world is much more complicated than simple stories about pills making people get better. We are human, we are irrational, we have foibles, and the power of the mind over the body is greater than anything you have previously imagined.

nutritionism has perverted and distorted our common sense about food.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

Put simply, the subjects’ faith in research data was not predicated on an objective appraisal of the research methodology, but on whether the results validated their preexisting views.

We are selectively exposed to information that revalidates our beliefs, partly because we expose ourselves to situations in which those beliefs are apparently confirmed; partly because we ask questions that will—by their very nature, for the reasons described above—give validating answers; and partly because we selectively expose ourselves to people who validate our beliefs.

Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief, through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.