Informed Health Choices Primary School Resources
A textbook and a teachers’ guide for 10 to 12-year-olds. The textbook includes a comic, exercises and classroom activities.
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Know Your Chances
This book has been shown in two randomized trials to improve peoples' understanding of risk in the context of health care choices.
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Calling Bullshit Syllabus
Carl Bergstrom's and Jevin West's nice syllabus for 'Calling Bullshit'.
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‘Tricks to help you get the result you want from your study (S4BE)
Inspired by a chapter in Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’, medical student Sam Marks shows you how to fiddle research results.
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Is it okay to ignore results from people you don’t trust?
Ben Goldacre: why it’s important to consider vested interests when judging research, but not to dismiss research by people you don’t like.
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Weasels Are on the Loose
Weaseling is the use of certain words to weaken a claim, so that the author can say something without actually saying it and avoid criticism
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Unsubstantiated and overstated claims of efficacy
A 32-slide presentation on misleading advertisements and FDA warnings prepared by PharmedOut.
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Critical appraisal
University of New South Wales Medical Statistics Tutorial 4 addresses Critical Appraisal.
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Not all scientific studies are created equally
David Schwartz dissects two types of studies that scientists use, illuminating why you should always approach claims with a critical eye.
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Cyagen is paying for citations
Pharmaceutical company Cyagen offers researchers and other writers $100 or more for citing their products in publications.
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Generation R – The need to reduce waste in clinical research involving children
1/3, 14-min video at the launch of GenerationR, a network of young people who advise researchers.
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5 reasons why you might not get the best healthcare
Five reasons why patients may not always get the best care available.
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Tamiflu: securing access to medical research data
A campaign by researchers has shown that Roche spun the research on Tamiflu to meet their commercial ends.
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MMR: the facts in the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield
This 15-page cartoon explains the events surrounding the MMR controversy, and provides links to the relevant evidence.
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Watson en busca de la evidencia
Cómic acerca de conflictos de intereses y búsqueda de información.
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Avoiding biased treatment comparisons
Biases in tests of treatments are those factors that can lead to conclusions that are systematically different from the truth.
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Recognizing researcher/sponsor biases and fraud
The vested interests of researchers and organizations tend to be reflected in reports of treatment research in which they are involved.
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Motivational Deficiency Disorder – a satirical look at disease mongering
Ray Moynihan’s 4-min video on ‘Motivational Deficiency Disorder’, illustrating ‘disease-mongering’.
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Personal “No Worse”
People with vested interests may use misleading statistics to support claims about the effects of new treatments.
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Avoid despair about biases
People who choose to ignore biases may do themselves and others harm.
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Does it work?
People with vested interests may use misleading statistics to support claims about the efects of new treatments.
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Thousand dollar placebo
People with vested interests may take advantage of peoples' fears or hopes..
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Peer-Review
Even quality control steps, such as peer-review, can be affected by conflicts of interest.
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Attrition bias, publication bias, comparator bias and commercial bias
6 slides and a 3-min commentary on attrition bias, publication bias, comparator bias and commercial bias (from Univ Mass Med School).
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Science fact or fiction? Making sense of cancer stories
A Cancer Research UK blog, explaining how to assess the quality of health claims about cancer.
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Beware conflicts of interest
In this 5-min videoed TED talk, psychologist Dan Ariely explains how conflicts of interest can bias research.
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Science Weekly Podcast – Ben Goldacre
A 1-hour audio interview with Ben Goldacre discussing misleading claims about research.
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Smart Health Choices: making sense of health advice
The Smart Health Choices e-book explains how to make informed health decisions.
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How to read articles about healthcare
This article 'How to read health news behind the headlines', by Dr Alicia White, explains how to assess health claims in the media.
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Commercialism
A webpage about commercialism and conflicts of interest in health research.
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Evaluating Online Health Information
A 30 minute e-Learning presentation by Medline Plus explaining how to evaluate health claims found on the internet.
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More is less: an investigation of unnecessary testing
This is a US radio production about unnecessary testing and the associated harm to patients and costs to the health system.
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Ben Goldacre talks about Bad Pharma on C-SPAN
In this 90 minute videoed lecture, Ben Goldacre talks about key issues raised in his book 'Bad Pharma'.
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Manipulating doctors: testimony from an ex-drug rep
In this 10-min video, Gwen Olsen, a former pharmaceutical sales representative, talks about manipulating doctors to sell more drugs.
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Help at last for the Annoyingly Cheerful
This humorous video by the Onion illustrates some of the tactics used to push unnecessary treatments or "sell" sickness.
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What does a positive genetic test mean? The example of coeliac disease
Video tutorial explores the ways in which evidence about the effectiveness of genetic testing can be misrepresented in advertising.
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Dodgy, devious and duped?
Writing a light-hearted article for a Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, two researchers created a spoof company called […]
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Doctors and drug companies
‘No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of […]
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Who decides what gets studied?
Clearly this situation is unsatisfactory, so how has it come about? One reason is that what gets studied by researchers […]
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Marketing-based medicine
‘Internal documents from the pharmaceutical industry suggest that the publicly available evidence base may not accurately represent the underlying data […]
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Recognizing vested interests and spin in systematic reviews
What if the reviewers have other interests that might affect the conduct or interpretation of their review? Perhaps the reviewers […]
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Believing is seeing
The British doctor Richard Asher noted in one of his essays for doctors: ‘If you can believe fervently in your […]
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The Screening Circus
In 2009, a recently retired professor of neurology with a long-standing interest in stroke prevention learnt that neighbours had received […]
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Bone marrow transplantation
However, the demise of mutilating surgery did not spell the end of the ‘more is better’ mindset – far from […]
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Avandia
2010 saw another drug – rosiglitazone, better known by the trade name Avandia – hitting the headlines because of unwanted […]
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Vioxx
Although drug-testing regulations have been tightened up considerably, even with the very best drug-testing practices there can be no absolute […]
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GET-IT provides plain language definitions of health research terms