Bad Science summary

How many multivitamins do you take every day in the hope that they will make you smarter or healthier, or even prevent some terrible disease? Many people have added multivitamins to their morning routine, but how much actual scientific evidence demonstrates their value?

Not much. In fact, the assertions made by nutritionists often lack scientific rigor, and therefore don’t stand up to scrutiny.

How reliable are drug trials? You probably think (and hope!) that the results are fair and accurate. Unfortunately, they aren’t always as honest as we’d like them to be.

This is partly because drug trials are extremely costly, and often financed by the drug companies themselves. In order to bring a drug to market, it must surmount a number of obstacles: first, it must pass the initial trials to determine safety, then trials to determine efficacy, and finally a larger-scale trial where it is measured against a placebo or comparable treatment. The total cost is close to a staggering $500 million on average.

No one understands why a placebo – a pill containing only sugar – can be used to treat a large range of conditions, such as tooth pain and angina. But somehow they do work.

In part, it is the “theater” of placebos that is crucial to their ability to help our bodies heal. For instance, details such as packaging, price and color all affect our expectations – and thus the outcome – of the treatment itself.

We tend to place a lot of trust in the results of medical trials. Why shouldn’t we? As it turns out, some evidence suggests that they might not always be fair tests.

For example, some trials don’t report how they randomize which participants are filtered into the treatment group or the non-treatment group.

Nothing is certain. That’s why we use statistics – the analysis of numbers and data – to determine something’s probability, such as the effectiveness of a treatment or the likelihood that certain crimes are going to happen. When used correctly, they can be incredibly useful.

For example, statistics can be used in meta-analysis, in which the results from many similar studies with few patients are combined into a larger, and therefore more robust and accurate test of whether a treatment is effective.

Can you remember the first time you drank coffee? Probably not. But can you remember your first kiss? I bet you can! So why is it easier to remember one event, but not the other?

This is because we have been conditioned to pick up and remember unusual events and forget everything else. Hence the way we remember and process information is necessarily biased, because we don’t treat all information equally.

You’ve probably seen “scientific” stories in the newspaper about things like the “happiest day of the year.” The media is full of fluffy stories like these which are passed off as the real deal, while stories about genuine scientific inquiry hardly ever make it into the news at all. Why is this?

The media’s problem is that the vast majority of today’s scientific advances simply happen too gradually to be newsworthy. There was a time, however, when this wasn’t the case: between 1935 and 1975, groundbreaking science was being churned out constantly.

It’s an unfortunate fact that we are drawn to headlines that play on our fears – for example, that we’ll all die from some horrible disease or be vaporized by an asteroid impact. The media love to scare us with terrifying stories – luckily, they are often total junk.

Stories that appear to be based on scientific evidence are often neither challenged nor properly investigated. For example, in 2005, newspapers reported that the “superbug” MRSA had been detected in various UK hospitals. Microbiologists from the hospitals, however, found no such bacterium.