Bad Science, Ben Goldacre

In my opinion, this book can be described as nothing other than brilliantly eye opening. Ben Goldacre discusses serious issues faced by the public, including medical professionals with a fantastic sense of humour and flair. I seriously enjoyed reading his book.
I enjoyed his chapter about Gillian McKeith, but that was mostly due to his whit as opposed to the science based knowledge he wrote about, which was definitely not lacking in other areas of the book. To start with, he debunked techniques that are widely used in schools, called 'brain gym', which I myself have been subjected to and wasn't overly enamoured by. These techniques include things such as creating 'brain buttons' which can be used to stimulate your carotid arteries from outside your ribcage by simply rubbing your chest. Obviously impossible. He then goes on to discuss the fact that the cosmetics industry are using long words which the general public are unlikely to understand in order to sell more products on the basis that if people do not understand the sciencey words they are likely to think that the product will be beneficial to their health. For example, the use of the names of specific compounds that are ingredients in the cream, when in fact, if you look closely enough at the packaging, or any of the advertising for the product, there are no claims that those specific chemicals will actually make you look better. As the author states, the claim is made for the cream on the whole, because as we are all aware, moisturising the skin will make it look nicer, but that could be done using a cheap cream as opposed to the expensive one with the magic, fancy chemical. This is an interesting point, which basically encompasses the message Ben Goldacre is trying to get across for the rest of the book, and that is the fact that we are too quick to believe the things we are told, particularly when it comes to scientific fact.
A fantastic example of this is the famous case with the MMR vaccines being linked to autism. The case which was eventually disproven, but only after thousands of children didn't receive the safe vaccination they needed to protect them from extremely dangerous diseases. This book addresses the idea that we are so easily misled in a clever and humorous way that keeps the reader engaged in even the most potentially tedious areas of deeply confusing statistical methods.
One thing I'm really glad I've been able to take from this book was knowledge of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation who carry out reviews of clinical trials and review them systematically, which has provided us with a database of information about how well the trials were conducted and the results found over a collection of trials as opposed to just one.
Overall, I loved reading Bad Science and feel that it educated me on the pharmaceutical industry as well as opening my eyes to some of the money making scams and how the media mislead us on scientific topics every day. I would definitely recommend it.