Dr Oz thinks that promoting quack medicine “empowers” people

The New Yorker has an article by Michael Specter on Dr Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon who is also the host of ‘The Dr. Oz Show’, a hugely popular US television program watched by millions of Americans. Dr Oz is notorious for his refusal to disavow ‘alternative’ medicine as unscientific and unproven; he promotes quackery like ‘miracle’ foods and cures, anti-GMO and anti-vaccine propaganda, Reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy and psychic powers alongside real, effective medical advice. To quote one of his critics, the cardiologist and professor of genomics Eric Topol, Dr Oz’s lack of discrimination between evidence-based medicine and alt-med can mislead people, since “how are consumers to know what is real and what is magic? Because Mehmet offers both as if they were one.”

Echoing the singer Tim Minchin, Specter writes:

Scientists often argue that, if alternative medicine proves effective through experimental research, it should no longer be considered alternative; at that point, it becomes medicine. By freely mixing alternatives with proven therapies, Oz makes it nearly impossible for the viewer of his show to assess the impact of either; the process just diminishes the value of science.

Neurologist Dr Steven Novella (who has been a guest on ‘The Dr. Oz Show’) is another critic of Dr Oz, writing in a blog post that “Promoters of alternative medicine [like Dr Oz] only pay inconsistent lip-service to science, but the core of their philosophy is that science is optional,” and that this is “a very dismissive attitude – the casual dismissal of scientific evidence simply because it contradicts a pet belief.”

The problem of shoddy methodology in medical science, whether in research or in the media, is also touched on by the physician and writer Dr Ben Goldacre in his book Bad Science. As a media personality, the issue of how entertainment values and populism subvert medicine is pertinent to Dr Oz’s case. He seems to think that truth is a democracy, that facts are determined not by the careful examination of reality but by popular vote. These personal beliefs about truth and facts are a core factor in Dr Oz’s promotion of quackery, as this passage from Specter’s article reveals:

”Either data works or it doesn’t,“ I [Specter] said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?” 

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it – that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true – was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

Dr Mehmet Oz is an epistemological relativist; to him, there is no such thing as objective truth, and unsubstantiated medical claims are just as valid as those backed by a mountain of evidence. With such a rotten ideological foundation, should it surprise us that his house of medical knowledge is so unsound? The tragedy is that Dr Oz has an impressionable audience of millions, many of whom may be harmed, not empowered, by the relativism of ‘America’s doctor’.

19.2.13

Evidence-based medicine should include ALL the evidence

Medicine has a dirty little secret: not all clinical trial results for drugs are reported, with positive results being “around twice as likely to get published as negative findings”, according to Dr Ben Goldacre, a medical science writer. Dr Goldacre calls this bias “a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine” and has written a book, Bad Pharma, that addresses this widespread problem.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) should take into account all clinical trial results, and not just cherry-pick the outcomes that match the drug manufacturer’s expectations, or quietly sweep the failed tests under the carpet. It isn’t evidence-based medicine if it doesn’t include all the evidence, even the negative ones. Those of us who criticise ‘alternative’ medicine for its lack of rigour and flawed methodology should be just as critical of similar trespasses in EBM. In fact, by claiming to be scientifically committed, EBM should be held to a higher standard of conduct.

There’s a petition calling for private and public medical researchers to publish all clinical trial results, both successes and failures, with test methods clearly described. Please sign it to show your support for evidence-based medicine that truly lives up to its name.

Here’s a TED talk by Dr Goldacre on the pernicious bias shown by drug researchers for positive clinical trial results, and why it has to stop. You will not find a more passionate, or animated, defender of proper evidence-based medicine.

5.2.13

Ben Goldacre takes on Big, Bad Pharma

Doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre has a new book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, that exposes in meticulous detail what many of us already suspect: pharmaceutical companies fudge the results of their drug trials in order to sell drugs that don’t work, or that are actually harmful. The cynics are right, though it would give them little satisfaction to learn the depressing extent of Big Pharma’s corruption.

The Guardian has published an extract from Bad Pharma, which contains this passage:

Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it's dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.

Proponents of ‘alternative’ medicine and other New Age quackery will be quick to pounce. They will feel vindicated for their distrust of modern drugs and the corrupt system that makes and markets them. Goldacre’s findings may prove Big Pharma’s critics right about its unethical practices, but these critics commit the logical fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant conclusion, if they think that Big Pharma’s unethical actions prove the efficacy of ‘alternative’ medicine. They don’t. What they do show is that more scientific skepticism and rigour is needed, not less. The fact that Big Pharma is largely a corrupt industry that puts profits before patients doesn’t mean that homeopathy works, or that vaccines cause autism.

Goldacre is certainly not an ally of the quacks. In his previous book, Bad Science, he debunked pseudoscientific claims about ‘alternative’ medicine, vaccines and consumer products, and also criticised the way that the media misrepresents science, thereby misinforming the public. I highly recommend it as a much needed corrective to the misconceptions and false beliefs that we all have about health matters. And Goldacre is an engaging writer, leavening his statistical analysis with vivid anecdotes and passionate arguments. His new book will no doubt fulfill a similar purpose; to wake up readers with a splash of cold, hard facts, however unpleasant it may be, and to propose solutions to a chronic and widespread problem that affects us all.

25.9.12

Science and politics (and how postmodernism can fuck things up)

Here’s the introduction for a New Scientist special report on the worrying state of science in the US (‘Decline and Fall’, 29 October):

The US was founded on Enlightenment values and is the most powerful scientific nation on Earth. And yet the status of science in public life has never appeared to be so low.

As campaigning for the 2012 presidential election gets into full swing, US politics, especially on the right, appears to have entered a parallel universe where ignorance, denial and unreason trump facts, evidence and rationality.

Almost all the main Republican presidential candidates subscribe to some variety of anti-scientific bunkum. Michele Bachmann thinks science classes should teach creationism; Rick Perry rejects evolutionary theory because “it’s got some gaps in it”; Newt Gingrich considers embryonic stem cell research to be nothing less than murder; Herman Cain claims that people choose to be homosexual.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates who display a modicum of scientific literacy are practically committing political suicide. Shawn Lawrence Otto writes:

Republicans diverge from anti-science politics at their peril. When leading candidate Mitt Romney said: “I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer… humans contribute to that,” conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh responded with “Bye bye, nomination”. Romney back-pedalled, saying, “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”

Anti-vaccination ads in Times Square

Anti-vaxers are going for the jugular this time. Mercola and the National Vaccine Information Center (or rather MIS-information Center) have launched an anti-vaccination ad campaign on the JumboTron in New York’s Times Square, where it will be seen by millions of locals and visitors. The lies and fearmongering must not go unchallenged.

There’s a petition asking CBS Outdoor, the owners of the JumboTron, to stop running the ads. Please sign it, even if you’re not a New Yorker or an American, and spread the word to all and sundry. Misinformation on health matters affects us all, no matter where we live.

Over at the Skepchick website, Elyse Anders has posted links to stories illustrating the harm caused by a significant drop in vaccination rates. When a certain number of kids in any given population aren’t vaccinated, it compromises the ‘herd immunity’ effect that acts to prevent outbreaks of contagious diseases.

Two trusted medical experts that I know of have written extensively on vaccines and the global anti-vax movement. Dr Ben Goldacre, who is also an investigative journalist, has covered these issues in newspaper articles, interviews, blog posts and his book Bad Science (2009). Dr Steven Novella is a neurologist and educator who has written about the efficacy, safety and necessity of vaccines on his blog NeuroLogica. I highly recommend you read what these two doctors have to say about the vile anti-vax campaign that needlessly puts children at risk of disease and death.

On a lighter note, here’s an awesome poem by the Digital Cuttlefish on the Times Square anti-vax ads.




12.4.11

Goldacre uncovers more lousy journalism

The Debunker of Disingenuous Drivel, the Nemesis of Newspaper Nonsense, the Scourge of Pseudoscientific Silliness, Ben ‘Quacksbane’ Goldacre, has asked a good question: why don’t journalists link to primary sources?

Goldacre’s article lays out three examples of journalistic jabber that didn’t bother to link to (or even understand) their information sources. Result: totally whacky reporting that crosses the border into Bullshitistan.

Hat tip to a commenter on Goldacre’s blog, Simon, who mentioned Julian ‘WikiLeaks’ Assange’s op-ed in The Australian. Assange advocated for what he called ‘scientific journalism’, which is basically what Goldacre’s arguing for: journalists linking to primary sources so that anyone can verify the information for themselves.

Media consumers/producers would be wise to keep in mind Goldacre’s Law:

If you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

20.3.11

A victory for critical journalism!

After 2 years slogging through an expensive libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association, journalist and science writer Simon Singh was finally vindicated on Thursday when the BCA dropped their libel suit. Medical bullshit-buster Ben Goldacre wrote a piece on the good news, and you can read the original article by Singh published in The Guardian in 2008. When the BCA sued Singh for apparently defaming their medically dubious profession, the article was forced to be taken down from the Guardian website. Since the libel case was dropped, it has been reinstated, to the cheers of intelligent folk across the land.

Now the push for libel law reform in the UK begins in earnest. Singh’s victory, though a sweet one, is only over one battle in a much larger war, a conflict that pits evidence-based medicine and rigorous science against the legions of bogus alternative therapies and their fraudulent claims. Without a legal system that protects free speech and scientific criticism, quacks, charlatans and witch-doctors will continue to threaten the health and welfare of gullible citizens, unchallenged by critics gagged with dysfunctional libel laws.

Let’s hope the UK gets the libel law reform it so obviously needs.




16.4.10

The three cultures

During the mid-twentieth century, the British physicist and novelist Charles Percy Snow wrote and spoke of the gulf between the ‘two cultures’; the humanities on one side and the sciences on the other. Snow observed that a breakdown in communication between intellectuals from both camps of knowledge was obstructing efforts to solve the world’s problems. In the nineties, American science writer John Brockman updated the concept of the two cultures by positing the emergence of a ‘third culture’. This third culture consisted of scientists and other intellectuals who were communicating their (mainly scientific) ideas directly to the public and in the process challenging the traditional cultural authority of writers and thinkers from the humanities.

Bad science, bad media

So here we are, newly arrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Yet in an era of bionic prosthetics, large hadron colliders and gene therapy, media corporations pay self-styled astrologers and ‘psychics’ to cast horoscopes and tell fortunes, the charlatans’ babble splashed across newspapers, magazines and websites. And on the same payroll as the mumbo-jumbo peddlers are journalists who cannot, or will not, differentiate between science and pseudoscience.