Placebo Weirdness

placebo

Check out @ProfessorFunk’s kinetic typography take on the utter weirdness of placebos, based on information from @BenGoldacre’s superlative book, Bad Science.

Quick updates

Answers to last week’s ‘radiological oddity’ and ‘pulmonary puzzle’ are now available: Radiological Oddity #014 Pulmonary puzzle #001 A big thanks to those who left comments – feel free to disagree with any of the answers! Also, If you’ve been following the Simon Singh vs. British Chiropracteric Association libel case (see Pseudoscience without sense), there [...]

Pseudoscience without sense

Pseudoscience

Poking fun and self-indulgent chuckling aside, there is a serious aspect to all this senseless pseudoscience.

Quackery Without Scruples

james-randi

The film also provides an excellent introduction to the “double-blind randomised controlled trial” – the study design generally recognised in medical science as the “gold standard”, because it removes confounding factors and accounts for the placebo effect.