I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (60 page)

statistics xvii–xviii, xix, 47–69; academic misuse of 129–31; algorithms and 52–3, 299; baseline problem 51–3; Benford’s Law 54–6; bicycle helmets and 110–13; chance and 56–8; coffee, hallucinatory effects of 64–6; datamining, terrorism and 51–3; government and xix, 147–65
see also
government statistics; Down’s syndrome births, increase in 61–3; journalists find imaginary patterns in statistical noise 101–4; joy of xv; neuroscience and misuse of xviii–xix, 131–4; ‘95 per cent confidence intervals’ 59–61; one data point isn’t enough to spot a pattern 49–51; positions of ancient sites analysis 66–9; random variation 57, 61, 102, 103; relative risk reduction 115; sampling error 56–61

steroids, head injury and 207–8

Stonewall 92–4

Stott, Carol 354–5

stroke 119–20

suicide: copy-cat behaviour and reporting of xxi–xxii, 361–3; heroin addiction and 242; linked to phone masts story 333, 363–7

Sun
: anti-cuts demo arrests story 155; ‘Downloading costs Billions’ story 159; pornography for sperm donors story 179–82; Sarah’s Law and 157–8

Sunday Express
:
Jab ‘as deadly as the Cancer’ cervical cancer story 331–4; ‘Suicides “linked to phone masts’’’ story 363–5

Sunday Sentinel, The
44

Sunday Telegraph
: ‘Health Warning: Exercise Makes You Fat’ story 335–7

Sunday Times
: Aids denialist reporting, 1990s and 283; ‘Public Sector Pay Races Ahead in a Recession’ story 149–52

superstition, performance and 313–15

‘surrogate’ outcomes 119–20, 225–6, 359

surveys xvi, xviii, 87–97; abortions, GPs and 90–1;
How to Lie with Statistics
(Huff) 89–91; interesting form of wrong 92–4; nature of questions/leading with questions 89–91, 94–7; sample with built-in bias
89–91

Swartz, Aaron 32–4

sympathetic nervous system 144

systematic reviews 6–7, 12, 20–1, 23, 25–8, 140, 156–7, 192–3, 298, 314, 323, 336, 359

Taliban 221–4

tap water, fluoride in 22–5

teaching profession, evidence-based practice revolution in xx, 202–18

Tennison, Steve 82

Terrence Higgins Trust 187

Test of Developed Abilities (TDA) 189

Thapar, Professor Anita 40

‘Therapeutic Touch’ 11–12

TheyWorkForYou.com 76

thinktanks xx, 180, 194–6, 227

time course 117

Time
magazine 89

Times, The
: ‘Down’s birth increase in a caring Britain’ story 61, 63; ‘girls really do prefer pink’ story
43; happiest places in Britain story 57; ‘The Value of Mathematics’, Reform thinktank report, coverage of 194

Trading Standards 12, 253

Traditional Chinese medicine 265

trionated particles xxii, 388–9

Trujillo, Cardinal Alfonso López 184

Turing test 392

2020health 180

Twitter 55, 257, 258, 308
n
, 315

UCL 198–9, 249, 252, 266; CIBER (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) 160, 161

UKUncut 155

Understanding Uncertainty website 102

Unite union 318

University College Hospital (UCH) 230, 241

University of California: Legacy Tobacco Documents Library 21

University of Chicago 285

University of Florida 134

University of Leicester 329

University of Newcastle 43
n

US Department of Defense 274

US Presidential Emergency Plan for Aids Relief 185

vaccine scares xxi, 85, 145, 273, 304, 331–4, 347–58, 399

vCJD 20

Velikovsky, Immanuel:
Worlds in Collision
261–2

Vietnam War 231

Wakefield, Andrew 347, 354, 355, 357–8

Washington Post
39

water, drinking 11

What Works Clearing House (US government website for teachers) 214–15

Whitehall 51, 75–6

wi-fi, link to harmful effects 289–91, 293

Wightman, Jim 391–5

Wilmshurst, Dr Peter 247–50

wind farms, stranding of whales blamed on 340–1

Wine Magnet, The 122–4

Woolworths, locations of 68–9

World Aids Conference, Toronto, 2006 186

World Cancer Research Fund 337

World Health Organization (WHO) 116, 233, 289, 356

Wyatt, Professor John 197–9, 201

Wyeth ADD (pharmaceutical company) 25–6

Ying Wu 265

York University: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at 23

YouGov 337

YouTube 258, 284

Zarrintan, Dr 144

ZenosBlog 253

Acknowledgements

I have been lucky enough to be taught, corrected, calibrated, cajoled, amused, housed, helped, loved, reared, encouraged and informed by a very large number of smart and excellent people, including (each, to be clear, for only a subset of the preceeding activities): Liz Parratt, John King, Steve Rolles, Mark Pilkington, Shalinee Singh, Emily Wilson, Ian Katz, Iain Chalmers, Alex Lomas, Liam Smeeth, Ian Sample, Carl Heneghan, Richard Lehman, Kathy Flower, Ginge Tulloch, Matt Tait, Carl Reynolds, Dara Ó Briain, Paul Glasziou, Simon Wessely, Cicely Marston, Archie Cochrane, William Lee, Hind Khalifeh, Martin McKee, Cory Doctorow, Evan Harris, Muir Gray, Rob Manuel, Tobias Sargent, Anna Powell-Smith, Tjeerd van Staa, Robin Ince, Fiona Godlee, Trish Groves, Tracy Brown, Sile Lane, David Spiegelhalter, Ute-Marie Paul, Roddy Mansfield, Amanda Palmer, Rami Tzabar, George Davey-Smith, Charlotte Wattebot-O’Brien, Patrick Matthews, Amber Marks, Giles Wakely, Andy Lewis, Suzie Whitwell, Harry Metcalfe, Gimpy, David Colquhoun, Louise Burton, Simon Singh, Vaughan Bell, Nick Mailer, Milly Marston, Tom Steinberg, Mike Jay, Chris, Tom, Reg, Mum, Dad, Josh, Raph, Allie, Archie, Alice and Lou. I’m hugely indebted to the late Pat Kavanagh, Zoe Ross, Rosemary Scoular and especially Sarah Ballard. Robert Lacey and Louise Haines at 4th Estate are mighty and strong.

My entire brain is now outsourced to a synchronised information monster fashioned from Evernote, Zotero, InstaPaper, Feedly and Twitter, and all plumbed in together using the high-level programming service If This Then That. This makes me more happy, less bored and more productive than I could possibly imagine being in any other era of human history. Scrivener will change your life if you write long structured documents. IntervalTimer gives you twenty-minute bursts of work followed by five of dithering. AntiSocial is a piece of software that, on a timer, irreversibly disables Twitter and Gmail on your computer when you’re working. Use this information wisely. In recent years I’ve had day jobs in various places including the magnificent London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and endless hospitals, supported by the National Institute for Health Research, the Scott Trust, the Wellcome Trust, Nuffield College Oxford, and the NHS, and a bursary from the Oxford University Business Economics Programme.

About the Author

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, academic, broadcaster and science writer who has made his name unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims from journalists, drug companies, politicians and quacks. His hugely influential ‘Bad Science’ column ran in the
Guardian
from 2003 to 2011. His first book,
Bad Science
, reached Number One in the bestseller charts, selling over half a million copies, and has been translated into 25 languages. His second,
Bad Pharma
, triggered to parliamentary committees and a global campaign to stop drug trial results being withheld from doctors and patients.

Also by Ben Goldacre

Bad Science

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken,

and How We Can Fix It

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