Massaging minds with bad science

I want everyone to read Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science. It should be in every school, and even if children are not taking science subjects (perhaps specifically if they aren’t) they should all be asked to read it.

I would place it at the heart of the science syllabus, so that the next generation of adults will know how to judge and dismiss the guff and pseudo-science that pervades some parts of the media.

Why am I so keen on Ben Goldacre? Because he is a voice of sense and reason at a time when we are being hoodwinked on all sides by people promoting their own unscientific fads and fancies at great profit to themselves. He exposes them brilliantly, with acid-sharp reason and great humour. It is not only the most important book of the last year, it is probably the funniest, too.

He starts off with one of my favourite targets – the detox industry. That suggests that our bodies are full of toxins that we must rid ourselves of, and that the best way to do so is to use their products, such as footbaths in salt water, or worse, enemas.

I won’t go into his attack on detox in detail, as it is very funny, and should be read at length, at your leisure. He then switches to the Brain Gym, which I hadn’t heard of, but am amazed to read has been adopted by many state schools.

The total misunderstanding of basic anatomy and physiology that it promotes is a shocking indictment of the poor scientific knowledge of any teacher who promotes it.

Instructions to ‘press your fingertips together to connect electrical circuits in the body’ or ‘wiggle your ears to stimulate part of the brain to tune out distracting irrelevant sounds and tune into language’ are such gibberish that it’s difficult to understand how such a programme could be accepted by science teachers.

It’s very clever, however. Experiments reported in one of this year’s Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience – it’s the foremost journal of the understanding of how the brain works – showed that people will buy into this sort of bogus twaddle if it is dressed up with a few technical words.

Brain Gym certainly does that. Do you know what the reticular formation is? No? Yet it is mentioned in Brain Gym as being the part of the brain affected by wiggling your ears. Convincing? It has convinced many schools to use it.

There’s loads more bad science in Brain Gym: when it suggests that children should massage their carotid arteries through their upper rib cage (to increase the oxygenation of the brain), Ben becomes hilarious. He suggests that they need mum’s sharpest scissors to cut through the bone first, to get at the arteries.

That’s only the start. Ben then takes on the cosmetic industry and its magic ingredients for moistening and de-ageing your skin. His take on them is predictable, but he makes a telling point about them that I hadn’t fully understood before.

In their advertisements promoting their molecules with fancy names, and their claims about DNA and delivering oxygen to your skin, they are really selling the idea to women that science is incomprehensible.

It is on a par, he says, with the Barbie doll who says things like ‘math class is tough’, ‘I love shopping’, and ‘will we ever have enough clothes?’ when you press her buttons. Could these industries get more insulting to women? Ponder on the pieces on antioxidants and vitamin pills, and wonder why they are still popular. Then think of the industry behind them.

Although all these incisive criticisms are spot on, the most important of all Ben’s chapters are ten, 11 and 12. They are entitled Is Mainstream Medicine Evil?; How The Media Promote The Public Misunderstanding Of Science; and Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things.

These three chapters are essential reading for everyone who wants to think for themselves and to make their own decisions.

The book is great fun, a brilliant read, and carries the most serious message. Which makes it the work of near-genius, although Ben himself would be the first to deny such status.

Bad Science is published by Fourth Estate at £12.99