Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

by Ben Goldacre

To these people “science” is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.

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.

These cleansing and purification rituals for child soldiers have the appearance of what anthropologists call rites of transition. That is, the child undergoes a symbolic change of status from someone who has existed in a realm of sanctioned norm-violation or norm-suspension (i.e. killing, war) to someone who must now live in a realm of peaceful behavioral and social norms, and conform to these.

There was an observed correlation between low blood levels of these antioxidant nutrients and a higher incidence of cancer and heart disease, and a plausible mechanism for how they could have been preventive, but when you gave them as supplements, it turned out that people were no better off or were possibly more likely to die. That is, in some respects, a shame, as nice quick fixes are always useful, but there you go. It means that something funny is going on, and it will be interesting to get to the bottom of it and find out what. More interesting is how uncommon it is for people even to be aware of these findings about antioxidants. There are various reasons why this has happened. First, it’s an unexpected finding, although in that regard antioxidants are hardly an isolated case. Things that work in theory often do not work in practice, and in such cases we need to revise our theories, even if it is painful.

Hormone replacement therapy seemed like a good idea for many decades, until the follow-up studies revealed the problems with it, so we changed our views. And calcium supplements once looked like a good idea for osteoporosis, but now it turns out that they probably increase the risk of heart attacks in older women,