When my GP finally diagnosed my M.E. (not at my pushing – it was a complete surprise), he said "within 24 hours you'll know more about this than I…

I'm sure they are.

Otoh, I do enjoy the fact that my doctor takes me seriously when I tell him I've…

Woohoo the Bart for King (a really bad idea) campaign gains it's first supporter :).

But yeah NZ is a real outlier on the advertising drugs to people who don't have the knowledge base to make a reasonable purchase decision.

I'd bet most MDs are royally…

Confirmation bias.

EVERYBODY does it. Me too. You look for facts that support your preconceived position. You accept supporting facts without question and you examine contrary evidence with a fine toothed comb.

It's very human and…

Apologies if someone has already mentioned this, but I think NZ and the US are the only two countries which allow Direct to Consumer Advertising for pharmaceuticals. We could easily ban them again.

Ask me about raw milk. Go on. Dare ya. "no-one has ever died from drinking raw milk", there's your opening line.

With Bernie at least you can say he has tried, and to some extent succeeded…

Man, I’ve had some discussions with Bernie Sanders fans in the past two weeks …

But more seriously, yes, zombie facts are a thing. There's stuff that never dies.

I found this part of his response interesting...

Now, if you see somebody writing something stupid or dumbed-down in the newspaper, you don’t just complain about it to your friends. You can write a blog, and you can go out there and read somebody else's blog. And you…

Do schools do much in this area in modern times?

In the 1990s I remember that parts of the curriculum I was subjected to for social studies, or whatever it was…

LoL

"Our data are consistent with the hypothesis and suggest it is possible that ..."

"WE'VE DISCOVERED ... "

Typically what you find (beyond the…

As a journalist, I think I've developed decent practices for working out who not to trust, and in many ways…

Yeah I get that too.

But the alternative is to tell people to trust experts.

And the problem with that is that without knowledge you can't determine who you should trust. Should you trust Greenpeace? I mean they pretty…

Learn some basic chemistry, like why different compounds of the same elements can have very different properties. Learn some biology around how substances get metabolised and used by the…

Not many homeopathic software debuggers either.

Yes and no. Bullshit comes in shades of grey. Most current knowledge is more or less bullshit and, importantly, there is a difference between bullshit and bullshitters. I am always on the look out for bullshitters (and as Russell has indicated, this is…

This is true. Towards the end of Hard News’s life as a radio rant in (script posted to the internet) I committed to sussing out the science on GMOs and I did get to the point where…

Yes and No

I am very much aware of the mountain of knowledge I've had to absorb to become an "expert" in my very narrow field. I know that mountain is just as high in every field. So no we…

And in most cases, we should naturally continue to do so.

Given a follow-up, I’d have put it to Ben that the same might apply to him: on some level we trust him because he’s witty, articulate…

Yes. Actually, that applies to nearly everything covered in the interview.

Ben’s right, I think, in most of the points he makes but reality is simply way more complicated than the…

That got promptly written up in the papers (and shouted from some blogs) as [[http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10494827|the drugs…

driven in the public eye by trust rather than evidence.
we are so grotesquely under-using the information we already have
people in very elevated social positions who seem…

Which is exactly the point Dr Goldacre is making.

Pretty much every scientist hates the way pharma…

I had a conversation once with someone expressing a view opposing vaccines (she wasn't anti-vaccine, but...), who cited Ben Goldacre in support of her position. "You can't trust anything researchers say, they're all employed by big pharma, Ben Goldacre says how they hide…

We're talking about me being King here so basically I'd just rule that treason and chop their heads off – I did mention me being king was a really…

Asked a kinda-friend if she wants to go, made myself not say "the social ethics aspect may be too pointed for you" because friend…

Interesting what he says about the anti-vaxxers. I think Wakefield is still very much alive for many people and not talking about him becomes another conspiracy.

At which point they get round both by doing what they do now- funding patient advocacy groups to call for funding. So "donating to a charity".

This too.

If I was king (a really bad idea) drug companies would be banned from making any media statement or advertising at all.

That was the reason Pharmac…

Which is what we see when drug companies push for Pharmac funding by taking those cases to a willing media.

And thanks Russell and Ben for the fascinating interview/article.

Also, I think that the further you get from seeing the meat hit the grinder the easier it is to forget that in the end that's what you're supposed to be working on. It's absolutely essential to…

We can do a quick and dirty look at google trends for news stories over time, comparing "miracle cure" with a baseline of the more boring "parliamentary debate".

http://www.google.co.nz/trends/explore#q=%22miracle%20cure%22%2C%20%22parliamentary%20debate%22&gprop=news&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-12…