#ben-goldacre
You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.
In terms of basic human chemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn't cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the 'detox system' in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body in certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention.
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, medicalised fantasy.
Like so much of the nonsense in bas science, 'detox' pseudoscience isn't something done to us, be venal and exploitative outsiders: it is a cultural product, a recurring theme, and we do it to ourselves.
Overall, doing research robustly and fairly does not necessary require more money, it simply requires that you think before you start. The only people to blame for the flaws in these studies are the people who performed them.
But these are just stories, and the plural of anecdote is not data.
In the nineteenth century, as the public health doctor Muir Gray has said, we made great advances through the provision of clean, clear water; in the twenty-first century we will make the same advances through clean, clear information. Systematic reviews are one of the great ideas of modern thought. They should be celebrated.
The fish-oil story is by no means unique: repeatedly, in a bid to sell pills, people sell a wider explanatory framework, and as George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem. #marketing
Terrible things happen in medicine, when it goes right as well as when it goes wrong. Everybody agrees that we should work to minimise the errors, everybody agrees that doctors are sometimes terrible; if the subject fascinates you, then I encourage you to buy one of the libraries' worth of books on clinical governance. Doctors can be awful, and mistakes can be murderous, but the philosophy driving evidence-based medicine is not. How well does it work?
It seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, everyone is basically a socialist when it comes to healthcare: we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil: I would agree with that premise. But because people don't understand how big pharma is evil, their anger and indignation get diverted away from valid criticisms - its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding life-saving AIDS drugs from the developing world - and channelled into infantile fantasies. "Big pharma is evil," goes the line of reasoning, "therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism." This is probably not helpful. #healthcare #logic #pharma #capitalism
These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
Stephen Jay Gould: "When people learn no tools of judgement and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."
I don't generally talk or write about being a doctor - it's mawkish and tedious, and I've no desire to preach from authority - but working in the NHS you meet patients from every conceivable walk of life, in huge numbers, discussing some of the most important issues in their lives. This has consistently taught me one thing: people aren't stupid. Anybody can understand anything, as long as it is clearly explained - but more than that, if they are sufficiently interested. What determines an audience's understanding is not so much scientific knowledge, but motivation: patients who are ill, with an important decision to make about treatment, can be very motivated indeed. #technical-writing #data-information-knowledge #pursuit-of-knowledge