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Bad Science (Goldacre Book)
''Bad Science'' is a book by Ben Goldacre, criticising mainstream media reporting on health and science issues. It was published by Fourth Estate in September 2008. It has been positively reviewed by the ''British Medical Journal'' and the ''Daily Telegraph'' and has reached the Top 10 bestseller list for Amazon Books. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize. Bad Science or BadScience is also the title of Goldacre's column in ''The Guardian'' and his website. Contents Each chapter deals with a specific aspect of bad science, often to illustrate a wider point. For example, the chapter on homeopathy becomes the point where he explains the placebo effect, regression to the mean (that is, the natural cycle of the disease), placebo-controlled trials (including the need for randomisation and double blinding), meta-analyses like the Cochrane Collaboration and publication bias. The subjects of each chapter (numbers reflect later editions) are: # The alternative medicine p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WikiProject Novels
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brain Gym
Brain Gym is a proprietary brain training and body movement programme. It is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Organization "Brain Gym International" is the trade name of the Educational Kinesiology Foundation, a California nonprofit corporation that was incorporated in 1987 and that received its IRS ruling as a nonprofit in 1992. "Brain Gym" is a registered trademark owned by the company. Business In the 1970s, Paul and Gail Dennison developed a set of physical exercises claimed to improve children's ability to learn and to be based in neuroscience; they called their approach "educational kinesthesiology". The company makes money training people in the methods, and licenses the right to use the "Brain Gym" trademark to people whom it trains; the trained people use branded books and other materials they buy from the company. Schools pay the trained people to work in schools, training teachers and working with students. In 2005 the company claimed to be selling its progr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll (also chlorophyl) is any of several related green pigments found in cyanobacteria and in the chloroplasts of algae and plants. Its name is derived from the Greek words , ("pale green") and , ("leaf"). Chlorophyll allow plants to absorb energy from light. Chlorophylls absorb light most strongly in the blue portion of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the red portion. Conversely, it is a poor absorber of green and near-green portions of the spectrum. Hence chlorophyll-containing tissues appear green because green light, diffusively reflected by structures like cell walls, is less absorbed. Two types of chlorophyll exist in the photosystems of green plants: chlorophyll ''a'' and ''b''. History Chlorophyll was first isolated and named by Joseph Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre Joseph Pelletier in 1817. The presence of magnesium in chlorophyll was discovered in 1906, and was that element's first detection in living tissue. After initial work done by German chemi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service in the United Kingdom. At the time, the only other channels were the television licence, licence-funded BBC One and BBC Two, and a single commercial broadcasting network ITV (TV network), ITV. The network's headquarters are based in London and Leeds, with creative hubs in Glasgow and Bristol. It is publicly owned and advertising-funded; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which was established in 1990 and came into operation in 1993. Until 2010, Channel 4 did not broadcast in Wales, but many of its programmes were re-broadcast ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
You Are What You Eat
''You Are What You Eat'' is a British dieting programme presented by Trisha Goddard and Amir Khan that broadcasts on Channel 5. The show was originally broadcast on Channel 4, before moving to Channel 5 in 2022 for its revived series. Both the Channel 4 and Channel 5 versions of the show were produced by CPL Productions (formerly Celador). The show originally ran from 2004 until 2006 on Channel 4 with controversial host Gillian McKeith. On 5 March 2021 it was confirmed the show would be revived with Goddard and Khan replacing McKeith as host, with the first episode of the new series broadcast back-to-back on Channel 5 with Dr Amir's ''How To Give Up Sugar (and Lose Weight)'' (also known as ''Dr Amir's Sugar Crash'') on 5 January 2022. ''You Are What You Eat'' was also the title of an American film from 1968. The phrase "You are what you eat" was first expressed by Ludwig Feuerbach in 1863 (German: ''.''). Original run The show originally ran for four seasons on Channel 4 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gillian McKeith
Gillian McKeith (born 28 September 1959) is a Scottish television personality and writer. She is known for her promotion of various pseudoscientific ideas about health and nutrition. She is the former host of Channel 4's ''You Are What You Eat'' (2004–2006), Granada Television's ''Dr Gillian McKeith's Feel Fab Forever'' (2009–2010), and W Network's ''Eat Yourself Sexy'' (2010). In 2008, McKeith regularly appeared on the E4 health show '' Supersize vs Superskinny'', and in 2010, she was a contestant on the tenth series of the ITV show ''I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!'' Numerous dieting and lifestyle plans supported by McKeith, such as the concept of the detox diet and the value of colonic irrigation, are pseudoscience not supported by scientific research, as are her claims that through examining people's tongues and stool samples she can identify their ailments and dietary needs. McKeith possesses no qualifications in nutrition or medicine from accredited institut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cherry Picking (fallacy)
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position. Cherry picking may be committed intentionally or unintentionally. The term is based on the perceived process of harvesting fruit, such as cherries. The picker would be expected to select only the ripest and healthiest fruits. An observer who sees only the selected fruit may thus wrongly conclude that most, or even all, of the tree's fruit is in a likewise good condition. This can also give a false impression of the quality of the fruit (since it is only a sample and is not a representative sample). A concept sometimes confused with cherry picking is the idea of gathering only the fruit that is easy to harvest, while ignoring other fruit that is higher up on the tree and thus more difficult to obtain (see ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tissue Culture
Tissue culture is the growth of tissues or cells in an artificial medium separate from the parent organism. This technique is also called micropropagation. This is typically facilitated via use of a liquid, semi-solid, or solid growth medium, such as broth or agar. Tissue culture commonly refers to the culture of animal cells and tissues, with the more specific term plant tissue culture being used for plants. The term "tissue culture" was coined by American pathologist Montrose Thomas Burrows. Historical use In 1885 Wilhelm Roux removed a section of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and maintained it in a warm saline solution for several days, establishing the basic principle of tissue culture. In 1907 the zoologist Ross Granville Harrison demonstrated the growth of frog embryonic cells that would give rise to nerve cells in a medium of clotted lymph. In 1913, E. Steinhardt, C. Israeli, and R. A. Lambert grew vaccinia virus in fragments of guinea pig corneal tiss ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surrogate Endpoint
In clinical trials, a surrogate endpoint (or surrogate marker) is a measure of effect of a specific treatment that may correlate with a ''real'' clinical endpoint but does not necessarily have a guaranteed relationship. The National Institutes of Health (USA) defines surrogate endpoint as "a biomarker intended to substitute for a clinical endpoint". Surrogate markers are used when the primary endpoint is undesired (e.g., death), or when the number of events is very small, thus making it impractical to conduct a clinical trial to gather a statistically significant number of endpoints. The FDA and other regulatory agencies will often accept evidence from clinical trials that show a direct clinical benefit to surrogate markers. Surrogate endpoints can be obtained from different modalities, such as, behavioural or cognitive scores, or biomarkers from Electroencephalography ( qEEG), MRI, PET, or biochemical biomarkers. A correlate does not make a surrogate. It is a common misconception ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nutritionism
Nutritionism is a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet. In other words, it is the idea that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins, and other components. Another aspect of the term is the implication that the only point of eating is to promote bodily health. The term is largely pejorative, implying that this way of viewing food is simplistic and harmful, and the term is usually used to label others' views. The concept's most prominent proponent, and popularizer of the term, journalist and professor of journalism Michael Pollan, argues that a food's nutritional value is "more than the sum of its parts." Originally credited to Gyorgy Scrinis, the notion was popularized by Michael Pollan. The key to Pollan's understanding of nutritionism is "the widely shared but unexamined assumption ... that the key to understanding food is indeed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Placebo
A placebo ( ) is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like Saline (medicine), saline), sham surgery, and other procedures. In general, placebos can affect how patients perceive their condition and encourage the body's chemical processes for relieving pain and a few other symptoms, but have no impact on the disease itself. Improvements that patients experience after being treated with a placebo can also be due to unrelated factors, such as regression to the mean (a statistical effect where an unusually high or low measurement is likely to be followed by a less extreme one). The use of placebos in clinical medicine raises ethical concerns, especially if they are disguised as an active treatment, as this introduces dishonesty into the doctor–patient relationship and bypasses informed consent. While it was once assumed that this deception was necessary for placebos to have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evidence-based Medicine
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients. Background, history and definition Medicine has a long history of scientific inquiry about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease. The concept of a controlled clinical trial was first described in 1662 by Jan Baptist van Helmont in reference to the practice of bloodletting. Wrote Van Helmont: The first published report describing the conduct and results of a controlled clinical trial was by James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon who conducted rese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
