DC's Improbable Science

Jump to follow-up The bulletin of the British Pharmacological Society, Pharmacology Matters, declined to publish the following article. Sadly the Society seems to be more interested in "reputation management" than in truth. Luckily, it is not easy to suppress criticism these days. A version of the article has appeared in Research Fortnight where it will [...]

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Jump to follow-up This is a very important book. Buy it now (that link is to Waterstone’s Amazon don’t pay tax in the UK, so don’t use them). When you’ve read it, do something about it. The book has lots of suggestions about what to do. Stolen from badscience.net   Peter Medawar, the eminent biologist, [...]

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Jump to follow-up In July 2008 I wrote an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ), at the request of its editor. The title was  Dr Who? deception by chiropractors.  It was not very flattering and it resulted in a letter from lawyers representing the New Zealand Chiropractic Association.  Luckily the editor of the [...]

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Jump to follow-up Alfred Joseph Clark FRS held the established chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1919 to 1926, when he left for Edinburgh.  In the 1920s and 30s, Clark was a great pioneer in the application of quantitative physical ideas to pharmacology.   As well as his classic scientific works, like The Mode of [...]

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There have been some really excellent books about quackery this year.  This isn’t one of them, because Nice dedication uh? it is about a lot more than quackery  It is about the scientific method in general. and in particular about how often it is misunderstood by journalists.  Abuse of evidence by the pharmaceutical industry is [...]

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Jump to follow up The extent to which irrationality has become established in US Medicine is truly alarming I wrote about Quackademics in the USA and Canada on my last trip to the USA, and on my May trip I visited Yale, where I decided to try a full frontal attack. [download the poster] Several [...]

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The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) last week had a headline “Staff loyalty key to Hefce report”. Staff loyalty is something I’m interested in, so I read on eagerly. The article was about report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). It came from their Leadership, Governance and Management Strategic Advisory Committee (dated [...]

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Jump straight to the stings. This advertisement has to be one of the sneakiest bits of spin that I’ve seen in a while. It appeared in today’s Guardian. And a lot more people will see it than will look at the homeopathic nonsense on the Boots ‘education’ site. What on earth does it mean? One [...]

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This may seem very odd to people outside the biosciences area, but in recent years a business has grown up that will write a paper for you, on the basis of data supplied by a pharmaceutical company. The person who actually did the writing will usually not appear as an author at all This practice [...]

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The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education: part 2. Scientists are no longer perceived exclusively as guardians of objective truth, but also as smart promoters of their own interests in a media-driven marketplace. Haerlin & Parr, Nature, 1999, 400, 499. This is a continuation of the previous post on Universities Inc, but with two examples from [...]

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The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education: part 1 The next post is about examples from the UK. Academic biologists and corporate researchers have become indistinguishable, and special awards are now given for collaborations between these two sectors for behavior that used to be cited as a conflict of interest. Richard Strohman, 1999. Every academic, and [...]

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The British Medical Journal ran an article on “doctor bloggers” last week. Photo ©Mark Thomas The BMJ put the article behind a paywall, but you can download a reprint here. Oops, no you can’t. The BMJ have dictated that their piece on bloggers should not be available to bloggers. If you want a copy, email [...]

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How irrational thinking in government and universities has led to the rise of new-age nonsense in the name of science. This article appeared on 15th August 2007, on the Guardian Science web site. The Guardian made very few cuts to the original version, but removed a lot of the links. If you want to have [...]

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Twenty-five hospitals from London and southern and eastern England have already either stopped sending any patients to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital or agreed to fund only a handful A campaign has started o save it, but the arguments are far from convincing. This is reposted from the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page The news is [...]

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BBC’s Panorama programme broadcast the content of secret emails. They show that GSK was aware of evidence the Seroxat increased risk of suicide in young patients, and suppressed it. They also showed that Prof Martin Keller’s paper on the topic was ghost-written by a PR firm working for GSK. Moved to this blog from the [...]

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