Wednesday 19 November 2008

Dr Ben Goldacre Bad Science lecture at BCNH was a great success

Last night’s lecture was informative, interesting and entertaining. Dr Goldacre is passionate about his topic as much as we are passionate about nutrition.

BCNH students and graduates asked the Principal to arrange another lecture with Dr Goldacre, this time on critical appraisal of research papers. They would very much like to hear his views on various trials.

A BSc student summoned it up: ‘everyone in attendance is in agreement that critical appraisal from outside (and inside) can be only beneficial, as it is the start point for improvement.’

BCNH Action Plan

1. Next week we will appoint a Scientific Advisor to the college with whom we will have regular meeting and reviews of the course material. We agree there needs to be better scientific rigour to our recommendations.

2. We hope to have a monthly debate with the Scientific Advisor to talk about recent studies, to give us an opportunity for critical self appraisal and to improve our research analysis.

3.
On our blog we should have a regular feature where we review quotes from our own profession, checking for bad science and highlighting spurious claims such as 'bilberries are good for eye strain'!

Deadline for change: 18 November 2009 (as challenged by Ben)


3 comments:

Jon said...

That's a really positive response to Ben Goldacre's talk and it will be interesting to follow your latest exciting developments about signing up a scientific advisor etc. and your plans for the future.

We heard that a couple of times during the talk, someone said something along the lines of "It's just a blog". Just to say that some blogs are quite detailed in the way that they cover scientific research and they may be of interest to the students at BCNH.

Science Based Medicine has many fine articles on matters relating to health, various interventions, diet and nutrition, the nature of evidence and evidence-based medicine.

Gaylard writes some interesting posts on various supplements, homeopathy etc. He wrote an accessible overview of forms of evidence: Commentary On In Pursuit Of Evidence By Kate Chatfield RSHom.

Science Blogs has a vast array of blogs in various amounts of detail that may be of interest to you and the students.

There are many, many more.

We, of course, write HolfordWatch.

BCNH said...

Thank you for your feedback and useful links.

You may be interested to note that we now have 2 blogs - the original one to provide some fun, as well as education for BCNH students, and an educational blog,(created recently) for academic purposes only:-
http://bcnhscienceblog.blogspot.com

We are having our first meeting with our Scientific Advisor on Monday and will report about it soon afterwards.

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