Credulous skeptic ...

... Tackling the epidemic of ‘bad science’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Goldacre is ambivalent in his attitude towards the public. On the one hand, he proclaims – almost as an afterthought in his epilogue - that ‘people aren’t stupid’. On the other, in the course of a familiar radical tirade against the evils of direct advertising in the USA by Big Pharma, he writes that ‘patients are so much more easily led than doctors by drug company advertising’. Again forsaking his scientific principles, he provides no evidence for a proposition that is no more than a personal prejudice, though no doubt one shared by most of his medical colleagues and his Guardian readers. In fact, Goldacre’s account provides numerous examples of how doctors have been misled by drug companies. I see no reason why patients, provided they have access to the appropriate information, should not be capable of making rational decisions in these matters.