Dr Ben Goldacre is too modest. He describes this collection of articles (previously published in the Guardian newspaper and elsewhere) as a kind of ‘statistic toilet book’, and says he is a ‘student of wrongness’, a self-deprecating ‘nerd evangelist’. Do not be taken in. Goldacre has a beguiling facility with numbers, but he is no trainspotter. He is not interested in data for their own sake; his interest is in what that information reveals.
Insight backed by facts is a powerful position, especially when delivered in Goldacre's vividly iconoclastic prose: he writes with the fervour of a buccaneering moralist. What does it feel like to be so engaged? Goldacre writes:
‘You might well view my work as pointless: like Sisyphus in an anorak, fighting my way up a greasy waterslide, defeated by the torrent of sewage, desperately trying to scratch one grumpy correction into yesterday's chip wrapper. But journalism like this is a genuine public health problem.’
If you share his outrage at the Daily Mail's ‘ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer’s, and are exasperated by unpersuasive efforts to make ‘Ka-Boom!’ science ‘FUN!’ then these articles will evoke a strange feeling: an excited pride at seeing statistics being deployed in anger, mixed with despair at the folly and corruption in public life that Goldacre exposes.
His targets include politicians' mendacious indifference to facts, and the irrationality of public policy. In a piece entitled ‘Andrew Lansley and his Imaginary Evidence’, he directs his anger at the erstwhile Secretary of State for Health in England:
‘There's no need to hide behind a cloak of scientific authority, murmuring the word “evidence” into microphones. If your reforms are a matter of ideology, legacy, whim and faith, then like many of your predecessors you could simply say so, and leave “evidence” to people who mean it.’
Goldacre exposes the venality of vested interests, especially in bad Pharma, bad journalism, and a clutch of outrageous quacks. But he also criticises the ‘real scientists, who can behave as badly as anyone else’. A word to ourselves: no one is immune to complacency and bias. If we are to practise a ‘good’ psychiatry rather than a ‘bad’ one, we need to inoculate our profession with Goldacre antibodies. We might usefully share his admiration for the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba – ‘on the word of nobody’.
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