badscienceblogs

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford but still Head of Science and Education at Biocare is keen on promoting the value of his 100%health subscription service. He spoke about his service in glowing terms at the recent Allergy and Gluten Free Show 2008[1] and recently sent around an email that trails a lot of interesting topics [...]

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday June 28, 2008
It’s the big stories I enjoy the most. “Suicides linked to phone masts” roared the Sunday Express front-page headline this week. “The spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.”

A story caught my eye earlier today - it was entitled “Boost Mental Health - Do Housework” and was based on a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. This is the news story and here is the abstract of the study, titled “Dose response relationship between physical activity and mental health: The Scottish [...]

Here at HolfordWatch, we were interested to see the Galway Advertiser referring the ‘Dr Patrick Holford’: Holford is not a doctor.  The paper has been contacted about this - and we are sure that Holford himself will be keen to see this error corrected. However, there are also a number of other significant problems [...]

Just a very brief note to say I’m sorry I have to work this weekend, so I can’t make my talk in the Green tent at Glastonbury with my old friend Shane Collins from the Green Party.

Amphibious robot snake.  Info here.  That is all.
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct5xe2Vnp6c

Have you ever heard the phrase (usually directed at some very recently-single lady) “he’s not worth your tears”?  Well, how much are tears worth, really?  How much are any of your bodily fluids worth?  Thankfully the good people at Innovative Research have just the answer!  See below for my handy graph showing the value of [...]

Many thanks to Steve and Bev for an excellent performance on behalf of the Autism Hub when they appeared on These Days, a talk show with an audience of tens of thousands in the San Diego area. You can download the interview here. They were being interviewed because both are speaking at the University of San Diego’s Summer Autism [...]

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford was in post for less than a year. I shall lose no time in assuming that he is sorely missed by his colleagues.

Everyone who has been slated by John Scudamore on Whale.to. The pharma gang and shill pages are my favourites. Frankly, I’m a bit gutted that I don’t get a mention - I’ll have to be more vocal in my criticism of JABS and Whale in future. Richard Doll is a shill (as are Ernst and Goldacre) so I [...]

The Independent this week reported on the MMR-autism scare (or, as I like to call it, The Media’s MMR Hoax) and named only one person who was to blame. Andy Wakefield. Now don’t get me wrong - I am certainly not about to defend Wakefield, or the Lancet paper, or the fact that Wakefield had been told his [...]

Richard Lenski is a biologist who recently found evidence for the emergence of new traits among E.coli bacteria, in a fascinating experiment which he has described in a paper in PNAS (best lay coverage here). His results look a bit like evolution. You will note that his paper includes the original data.
Andrew Schlafly is [...]

The game is to see how long it takes to get banned from an alternative medicine or other irrational site. I tried it with www.mercola.com. I have been monitoring the site for some time, and the other week decided to see how tolerant Joe Mercola would be to someone telling the truth. So I created [...]

Whether you are a parent seeking a cure or an advocate for neurodiversity who worries about calls to eradicate autism it is easy to get locked into a mind set in which nothing else seems to matter. What could be more important than your child’s health or your right to exist? These are important. But there [...]

The Sunday Express appears to have decided that mobile phone masts are responsible for the Bridgend suicides.
The story is by Lucy Johnston but the information within it has clearly come from Roger Coghill, who is quoted extensively. It is claimed that he sits on a Government advisory committee on mobile radiation. This is not true. [...]

Many years ago, a delightful video entitled Powers of Ten was created, enthralling all who viewed it as they were taken to the outer reaches of space and then down to the inner workings of a cell.  Enjoying a massive surge of interest after it was posted on YouTube, Eames Office LLC got all whiny [...]

George Carlin is dead. Fuck.Todays a day for swearing people. George Carlin was a hero for skeptics and realists and you owe him a lot - whether you realise it or not.To put that aged clipped in context watch this episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit on…

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford and Head of Science and Education at Biocare has been interviewed in South Africa as part of his promotional work for Optimum Nutrition Made Easy. Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. Regular readers are accustomed to Holford’s alternate reality (and part 2) so will not be surprised that he refers [...]

People sometimes ask why this blog is all about vaccines when it is supposed to be about autism. Of course it is not all about vaccines. But it must seem like that because a lot of the time I am responding to the argument that vaccines are a cause of autism. Why do I bother when there is [...]

A few days ago I corrected a Telegraph article about homeopathy, as part of Homeopathy Awareness Week. (That is of course not the official ‘week’ website but it is better.) Today, as the week ends (after eight days for some reason), I will apply much the same corrections to another homeopathy article, this time courtesy [...]