Bad Science: Matthias Rath

One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. The book explains how media drug tests work, how drug companies ‘doctor’ test results, the media’s MMR vaccine hoax and the general state of medial and science reporting in the media.

Now, whilst Dr Goldacre was writing the book he was under a lawyer-mandated gag order not to include any of his well documented debunking of Matthias Rath. Rath is a German born vitamin entrepreneur who conducted illegal drug trials in South Africa, and endangered thousands of lives in South Africa by promoting his vitamin pills while denouncing conventional HIV drugs as toxic and dangerous. Rath claimed his pills could reverse the course of Aids and distributed them free in South Africa, undermining the genuine efforts to treat HIV-infected people in Africa.

However, last September Rath dropped his case of libel against Goldacre and the Guardian, (which publishes Goldacre’s Bad Science column). As such the missing chapter from the book on the activities of Rath has been released by Goldacre for free on his site. Whether you have read the book or not it is really worth reading, and hopefully it will tempt you to buy the book if you have not done so already.

The alternative therapy movement as a whole has demonstrated itself to be so dangerously, systemically incapable of critical self-appraisal that it cannot step up even in a case like that of Rath: in that count I include tens of thousands of practitioners, writers, administrators and more. This is how ideas go badly wrong.
Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is both funny and illuminating, and you really should read the book.