Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme.

The current regulations – for companies, doctors and researchers – create perverse incentives; and we’ll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice.

Blood pressure readings are an inexact technique, like ECG interpretation, X-ray interpretation, pain scores, and many other measurements that are routinely used in clinical trials. I.

When I go through busy periods of partying, drinking, sleep deprivation and convenience eating, I usually decide – eventually – that I need a bit of a rest. So I have a few nights in, reading at home, and eating more salad than usual. Models and celebrities, meanwhile, ‘detox’.

Doubt has also been cast on the value of McKeith’s certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, especially since Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre managed to buy the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.

We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup?

Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in World War II. Clothing conventions do change over time.

Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.

In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.

Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills that seem to work, and.