Ben Goldacre

A great book RTCs is Ben Goldacre's Bad Science (http://www.badscience.net/)

He points out that some of the first clinical trials recorded were in the bible. I couldn't find his quote, but I found an NEJM piece that references the same thing, although I think its in a nutrition debate.

"The first published report of a clinical trial has biblical origins. In the Book of Daniel,5 reference is made to the unwillingness of the Israelite Daniel to accept the diet offered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. The king's official had put a steward in charge of Daniel and his three friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego):"

"Daniel said to the steward . . . “Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's rich food be observed by you, and according to what you see deal with your servants.” So he hearkened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's rich food. So the steward took away their rich food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables."

(http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200301023480120)

"you think X is easy?" is a pointless statement. Everything is easy or difficult to different extents to different people. Also, the difficulty of solving a problem is not the primary criterion for choosing whether to attempt or expect to solve the problem. More importantly, there are no excuses for unethical behavior and fraudulent research.

I haven't read the book but I have read a lot of Ben Goldacre's articles (http://www.badscience.net/). His arguments are typically about how quacks, kooks, and pharmas practice 'bad' and fraudulent 'science' and are dishonest in presenting the results of their 'research'.

A vast majority of the population is inept at understanding the kind of statistical language in which drug companies misrepresent results. In addition to innate human propensity for logical fallacies (e.g. Type 1 thinking- Kahneman, Tversky, etc.), our perception is tainted by the personal dimensions of issues related to health and suffering.

Ben Goldacre is a darn good science 'popularizer' and does a great job of explaining these things to a general audience.

This article re-hashes much of the content of Ben Goldacre's book 'Bad Pharma', however it does not propose any solutions (Ben Goldacre does). There is plenty that can be done with legislation, as a customer of healthcare and in clinical trials. If all trials - good results or bad - were published then we would be half way there.

http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-pharma/

The article mentions the company 'Amgen' and how they were not able to reproduce some earlier trial results. Alarm bells went off for me right there at the word 'Amgen'. They were the company that had the wonder drug EPO, as in of Lance Armstrong fame. That story is truly fascinating and best pieced together from the book 'Blood Medicine':

http://www.bloodmedicine.info/

...and from the cycling scandal books that have came out recently, e.g. Tyler Hamilton's.

EDIT -- In reference to The Blank Slate:

I read it awhile back, and while there are some stretches in his usage of evolution to explain every form of behavior, e.g., people sat around fires for millenia therefore storytelling ability evolved, his explanations concerning adaptations for general survival utility are well supported.

I would recommend reading it with a grain of salt, and take evolutionary psychology for what it is, with the same level of skepticism you would apply to get data from any social "science".

EDIT--Some suggestive guideposts when reading in this field:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003817.html

http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/papers/Controversies.pdf
http://www.badscience.net/?p=518

Be on the lookout for handwaving, but certainly investigate. Don't make it the only book you read in this area...

Yes, which, by itself, would not be a problem (of course, you would need to watch closely for conflicts of interest clouding the issue). No, the real problem is that the drug companies do not have to release all of the data associated with the trials they perform. They don't even have to publish all of the trials they perform.

Given that, I have a very hard time trusting any drug that does not show amazingly stellar clinical trial results. If you have the options of cherry picking what you publish, and your drug only "helps" 50% of the participants, I see that as random noise.

Ben Goldacre[1] is trying to shine a spotlight on this, and is doing a pretty good job. His Ted Talk[2] is well worth watching.

1. http://www.badscience.net/

2. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science

We do know that there are elements of contagion around suicidality and self harm. People use the word "trigguring" (a bit problematic because the word has spread from and to other situations which have different levels of appropriateness) but yes, we are pretty sure that someone with anorexia who spends a lot of time talking to other people with anorexia, especially if they're actively sharing thinspo tips, is going to find recovery harder and that this is causal.

While it's great that people with lots of data do research, and there are problems with ethics panels[1], we should be very careful with anything designed to manipulate emotions.

[1] Ben Goldacre talks about this http://www.badscience.net/2011/03/when-ethics-committees-kill/