Free your mind

Blogging's been light recently - I've been quite busy with one thing and another (although that's not necessarily the same thing as being productive). I've been reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, the book of the newspaper column. It would have been an entertaining read if Goldacre had simply pointed at some of the more bizarre claims of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and laughed. In fact I'd be a bit worried about anybody who couldn't see the funny side of claims that wearing a bit of quartz round your neck, sticking a candle in your ear, or putting a hosepipe up your bottom represent new "wellness paradigms" or some such nonsense. Taking the mick out of the more obviously wacky side of CAM is easy (although no less entertaining for all that), but Goldacre tackles some more tricky targets, in particular, high profile nutritionists.

These people are harder for the lay person without any scientific training to spot. They've been called the stealth bombers of the CAM movement, deploying the sort of words a real scientist or medical professional might use - vitamins, trace elements, enzymes, proteins and antioxidants, rather than showing up on the nutter radar by ranting on about chakras, meridians, auras and electromagnetic vibrational systems. I must admit to having been taken in myself, having taken a look at a copy of Patrick Holford's The Optimum Nutrition Bible a few years ago.

To my shame, after a not very rigorous skim through a few chapters which I thought might be relevant, I gave his book the qualified benefit of the doubt (fortunately I've been in generally good health, so I didn't feel obliged to read any of his advice with great attention, but I might have given it a try if I'd had some of the symptoms of the conditions he attributed to suboptimal nutrition). Reading one of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science columns about Holford, some time later, it began to dawn on me that I'd been had. I could have read more about exactly was wrong with Holford, but I wasn't sufficiently interested in health and "wellness" issues to follow it up - I was aware of the, the Holford Watch site, but didn't spend any time on it, partly because the the various single-issue "watch" sites sound a bit obsessional to me. Which is a pity, because the Holford chapter is a gem.

It was humbling but instructive to read Ben Goldacre taking The Optimum Nutrition Bible apart in detail, picking out such choice nuggets as:

• cherry-picking the data to support his conclusions
• citing flawed, and now retracted papers by a discredited researcher
• over-interpreting the results of valid studies to make claims the researchers wouldn't recognise
• a claim that doses of vitamin C are more effective than AZT in treating AIDS
• making dramatic claims, (for example that giving autistic children doses of vitamin A has an extraordinarily beneficial effect on their social interactions) without any references
  
• reassuring the reader by throwing in the occasional piece of commonplace, common-sense dietary advice among the impressive-looking tables, diagrams and technical-sounding stuff about hormones, lipoproteins and digestive enzymes.
  

Underneath the sometimes plausable-sounding complexities, it's really simple - The Optimum Nutrition Bible is a book by a supplement pill salesman, explaining how most of our medical problems can be solved by eating more supplement pills.

In reality, better minds than Holford's are confused by the intricacies of diet. As Goldacre points out, in theory, ingesting more antioxidants sounds like a good idea. When the idea is tested in trials, the results suggest that there's no beneficial effect from increasing your antioxidant intake - in fact, high levels may even be harmful. In reality, the best advice is the stuff that's simple and easy to understand - eat a varied diet, including plenty of fruit and veg, don't smoke, don't drink too much alcohol, take exercise. It might not be easy to do, but it's easy to get your head round - so chuck out the spin and over-complication, along with the pills the nutritionists would love you to buy and free your mind.

There's lots more good stuff in Bad Science about the relationship between medical science, flawed medical science, PR, the media, pharmaceutical companies torturing the data to push the latest miracle cure and much, much more. It's a piece of hard investigative work and clear thinking that stands head and shoulders above much of the reflexive "churnlism" that propagates so much of the misinformation Goldacre uncovers.

After being so easily taken in by Holford, maybe I am getting the message. One of the pharmaceutical companies' tricks, pointed out in Bad Science is the medicalisation of an ever-greater range of conditions which were formerly just normal, if sometimes unpleasant, parts of life (inventing a syndrome to fit a pill they just happen to have). In one of his recent columns Ben Goldacre notices the invention of Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder as the latest example of this trend. A while ago, with less style, knowledge and insight, I noticed the same thing - this reassures me that I do occasionally pay attention.