ben goldacre witters on and on and on about things that are too long to post on twitter and not clever enough to post on his main blog at www.badscience.net
I spend a of my time shouting about systematic reviews, and how baffling it is that they're so recent. Cochrane Collaboration were instrumental in developing these ideas, and they've just released a bunch of videos to celebrate the anniversary. There are lots of interviews and old pictures featuring people you should have heard of, and some great human history of the battles for evidence that have shaped medicine. Some are memorable moments (like David Weatherall talking about the criticism of the Oxford Textbook...
This looks like an interesting backgrounder, via @paulbradshaw I have, incidentally, a fantasy YouTube video series that I would like to commission: civil servants from the Department of Health explain the administrative structures of the new NHS after the current redisorganisation, to drunk people, and then the drunk people have to explain it back to the camera. It'll be like Drunk History meets the King's Fund. Anyway, here's the event. Get in touch if you want to make the video, I'm ben@badscience.net and we...
This is a gorgeous, informative song about techy details of evidence based practiceI totally agree with the principles set out here - the importance of thinking critically about the merits of surrogate outcomes, or benefits which are statistically significant but only clinically modest - though I'm not sure I agree with all his implicit summary conclusions about specific interventions. But that's kind of THE POINT. If you're bored: I'm @bengoldacre on Twitter. My first book is Bad Science My second book is Bad...
Chavez was a mixed picture, but he had some amazing lines, and he was elected. Here's an amazing documentary that was filmed during the coup against him. It has some very scary moments, and the people on the other side don't come out looking too good. If you're bored: I'm @bengoldacre on Twitter. My first book is Bad Science My second book is Bad Pharma My main blog is here. My throwaway blog is here. I did this TED talk, and this TED talk.
This 911 call is absolutely chilling. A nurse refuses to give CPR to a dying patient, explaining that it's not her job, and that her boss won't let her. She also refuses to hand the phone to any passer-by who will help save the life. The recording of the call is upsetting, it's a very peculiar situation. I could understand this a little more if the person on the phone said that the person had a "Do Not Resuscitate" documented. If you're bored: I'm @bengoldacre on Twitter. My first book is Bad...
There's a good editorial in the NEJM this week: the evidence for endovascular therapy is poor, but now that it's approved, and paid for, it's hard to get people into randomised trials to find out if it's any good. As you know, my interest in pharma is just a subset of my interest in the broader issues around poor evidence based practice in medicine. We invented the ideals of evidence based medicine, much more recently than most people realise, and now we run around acting like we have instantiated it. The reality...
i haven't seen her for ages. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Academic Convenors 2013 Date: Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:42 AM Subject: Invitation to the 54th AMSA National Convention To: ben@badscience.net, sballard@unitedagents.co.uk Dear Dr Goldacre, It is with great pleasure that we would like to invite Ms Natalie Portman to address the delegates of the 54th National Convention of the Australian Medical Students' Association (AMSA). This event will be held on the...
I just got called by a radio show asking me to discuss this flippent tweet: Huhne. Is the imprisonment rate higher for MPs than for general popul'n, accounting for class mix? bbc.co.uk/news/uk-213209…— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 4, 2013 But I think it's a really important and interesting question. Do more MPs go to prison than we'd expect? Accounting for age, class and gender mix of parliament (since those may be confounders in either direction)? To calculate this, we would need: 1. a list...
"Storyboard" watches a film with subtitles for you, takes a still when the words change, and so turns a film into a picture book. "Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them. Normally that would involve putting the TV on in the background and ignoring the video while listening to the audio, but what about the reverse? All visual without the audio. On my kindle." I think this is a work of automated format-shifting genius. http://syntaxi.net/2013...