Physician and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre gives a great TED Talk on battling bogus health science, in the media and in science itself:
Goldacre starts out with fairly standard debunking of bad science journalism. Too often, he says, a news story about how “red wine prevents cancer” turns out to be based on a paper about how dripping red grape extract onto cancer cells in a petri dish affects the behavior of a particular enzyme. It might be a perfectly good paper and even an exciting result, but it has nothing to do with whether drinking red wine would prevent cancer.
Goldacre goes on to talk about badly designed studies: observational studies with huge confounds, clinical trials with no control group, and so on.
The most interesting part of the talk is Goldacre’s discussion about how pharmaceutical companies distort scientific evidence to favor their own products.
Industry-sponsored trials are four times more likely to deliver positive results than independently sponsored trials.
Sometimes companies stack the odds in their favor by using improperly designed studies. A favorite tactic is to compare the new drug to a placebo when there’s already a good alternative treatment available. Another ploy is to compare a correct dose of the experimental drug to the wrong dose of the control drug – so that the patients in the control group are under-treated or plagued by side effects.
However, Goldacre says, in general industry sponsored trials are better designed than independently sponsored trials. (He doesn’t explain why that might be.)
The real problem is that the industry simply hides negative results. We know this is going on because pharmaceutical companies have been caught doing it, and because statistical analysis of the range of studies that do get published points to massive as-yet-undiscovered data suppression by industry.
There’s a certain amount of publication bias in all research, but the problem is exponentially worse when science becomes an extension of marketing.
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