October 4, 2011 | 10:03 AM |

Battling Bad Science (The Video)

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, evidence-based medicine, science

Here’s doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre making the case (in a TED talk) for real science — the kind that “critically appraises the evidence for someone else’s position” — and against “crazy, wacky” newspaper headlines, for instance, the ones that say coffee both prevents and causes cancer. (There’s also a funny aside about a dead cat called Hettie and her medical credentials.)

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →