New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

This website is the brainchild of Ben Goldacre (medical doctor, journalist for the Guardian, broadcaster and author extraordinaire. He's won awards even!) Bad Science is a regular blog by Dr Goldacre which focuses mostly on the misrepresentation of science and research in the media. Ben takes headline-catching news items or ‘scientific' claims made by peddlers of therapies and examines the underlying research. Best of all however, Ben presents his analysis humorously and in clear, lay language - taking time to describe in simple terms the principles behind scientific method where need be. In other words this is a fun, engaging website that makes evidence-based medicine easy to understand, all the while challenging common assumptions and misunderstandings that exist in the public mind.

To give one example, Dr Goldacre turned his gaze earlier this year to the ‘pixie dust' that was claimed to help regrow a man's severed finger. The ‘pixie dust' was pig's bladder extract and the newspapers were full of the exciting potential of this discovery. Goldacre's approach was to question how much finger was actually lost (only the very tip in fact, no missing nail-bed, no missing distal finger joint), what recovery is usually expected from such injuries (full), and who was making the pig bladder extract claims. As it turns out, the man who lost his finger tip, Lee Spievack, happened to be the brother of the founder of the biotech firm, Acell, who produced the pig's bladder power; the firm which employs Dr Badylak, the chief scientific adviser who has appeared in all the media items on this story. Apparently, the injury in question, reported on so excitedly by the media earlier this year, actually occurred and was healed back in 2005. But don't take my word for it, read about it with all the hypertext links, here at the Bad Science website.

The other fairly recent item that deserves a quick mention, is Ben Goldacre's analysis of the damning media commentary on ‘new' meta-analysis which has demonstrated that anti-depressant medication are not effective for mild to moderate depression. Dr Goldacre take on this story was in fact to say it was nothing new. He writes: ‘we already knew that antidepressants perform only marginally better than placebo and that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines has actively advised against using them in milder depression since 2004.' For more information on this story and for Ben Goldacre complete analysis of the research behind the recommendation, visit the Bad Science website here. Incidentally, the BBC's Ouch! website's satirical take on this news story was to run a poll which simply read ‘Does your antidepressant medication work? Yes/No'. Unfortunately, despite emailing Ouch! I was unable to get my hands on the final results from that poll, presumably because the last thing Ouch! wants is for people like me publishing their poll-results as fact.