Bad Science - Ben Goldacre

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find a waxy orange substance. In the ‘picnic table control’, you will find a waxy orange substance. There is only one internationally recognised method for identifying something as earwax: pick some up on the end of your finger, and touch it with your tongue. If your experiment had the same results as mine, both of them taste a lot like candle wax.

      Does the ear candle remove earwax from your ears? You can’t tell, but a published study followed patients during a full programme of ear candling, and found no reduction. For all that you might have learnt something useful here about the experimental method, there is something more significant you should have picked up: it is expensive, tedious and time-consuming to test every whim concocted out of thin air by therapists selling unlikely miracle cures. But it can be done, and it is done.

       Detox patches and the ‘hassle barrier’

      Last in our brown-sludge detox triptych comes the detox foot patch. These are available in most high-street health-food stores, or from your local Avon lady (this is true). They look like teabags, with a foil backing which you stick onto your foot using an adhesive edging before you get into bed. When you wake up the next morning there is a strange-smelling, sticky brown sludge attached to the bottom of your foot, and inside the teabag. This sludge—you may spot a pattern here—is said to be ‘toxins’. Except it’s not. By now you can probably come up with a quick experiment to show that. I’ll give you one option in a footnote.*

      An experiment is one way of determining whether an observable effect—sludge—is related to a given process. But you can also pull things apart on a more theoretical level. If you examine the list of ingredients in these patches, you will see that they have been very carefully designed.

      The first thing on the list is ‘pyroligneous acid’, or wood vinegar. This is a brown powder which is highly ‘hygroscopic’, a word which simply means that it attracts and absorbs water, like those little silica bags that come in electronic equipment packaging. If there is any moisture around, wood vinegar will absorb it, and make a brown mush which feels warm against your skin.

      What is the other major ingredient, impressively listed as ‘hydrolysed carbohydrate’? A carbohydrate is a long string of sugar molecules all stuck together. Starch is a carbohydrate, for example, and in your body this is broken down gradually into the individual sugar molecules by your digestive enzymes, so that you can absorb it. The process of breaking down a carbohydrate molecule into its individual sugars is called ‘hydrolysis’. So ‘hydrolysed carbohydrate’, as you might have worked out by now, for all that it sounds sciencey, basically means ‘sugar’. Obviously sugar goes sticky in sweat.

      Is there anything more to these patches than that? Yes. There is a new device which we should call ‘the hassle barrier’, another recurring theme in the more advanced forms of foolishness which we shall be reviewing later. There are huge numbers of different brands, and many of them offer excellent and lengthy documents full of science to prove that they work: they have diagrams and graphs, and the appearance of scienciness; but the key elements are missing. There are experiments, they say, which prove that detox patches do something … but they don’t tell you what these experiments consisted of, or what their ‘methods’ were, they only offer decorous graphs of ‘results’.

      To focus on the methods is to miss the point of these apparent ‘experiments’: they aren’t about the methods, they’re about the positive result, the graph, and the appearance of science. These are superficially plausible totems to frighten off a questioning journalist, a hassle barrier, and this is another recurring theme which we will see—in more complex forms—around many of the more advanced areas of bad science. You will come to love the details.

       If it’s not science, what is it?

      Find out if drinking urine, balancing on mountain ledges and genital weightlifting really did change their lives forever.

      Channel 4’s Extreme Celebrity Detox

      These are the absurd extremes of detox, but they speak of the larger market, the antioxidant pills, the potions, the books, the juices, the five-day ‘programmes’, the pipes up the bum and the dreary TV shows, all of which we will torpedo, mostly in a later chapter on nutritionism. But there is something important happening here, with detox, and I don’t think it’s enough just to say, ‘All this is nonsense.’

      The detox phenomenon is interesting because it represents one of the most grandiose innovations of marketers, lifestyle gurus, and alternative therapists: the invention of a whole new physiological process. In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn’t cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the ‘detox system’ in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention.

      If you look at a metabolic flow chart, the gigantic wall-sized maps of all the molecules in your body, detailing the way that food is broken down into its constituent parts, and then those components are converted between each other, and then those new building blocks are assembled into muscle, and bone, and tongue, and bile, and sweat, and bogey, and hair, and skin, and sperm, and brain, and everything that makes you you, it’s hard to pick out one thing that is the ‘detox system’.

      Because it has no scientific meaning, detox is much better understood as a cultural product. Like the best pseudoscientific inventions, it deliberately blends useful common sense with outlandish, medicalised fantasy. In some respects, how much you buy into this reflects how self-dramatising you want to be; or in less damning terms, how much you enjoy ritual in your daily life. When I go through busy periods of partying, drinking, sleep deprivation and convenience eating, I usually decide—eventually—that I need a bit of a rest. So I have a few nights in, reading at home, and eating more salad than usual. Models and celebrities, meanwhile, ‘detox’.

      On one thing we must be absolutely clear, because this is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science. There is nothing wrong with the notion of eating healthily and abstaining from various risk factors for ill health like excessive alcohol use. But that is not what detox is about: these are quick-fix health drives, constructed from the outset as short-term, while lifestyle risk factors for ill health have their impact over a lifetime. But I am even willing to agree that some people might try a five-day detox and remember (or even learn) what it’s like to eat vegetables, and that gets no criticism from me.

      What’s wrong is to pretend that these rituals are based in science, or even that they are new. Almost every religion and culture has some form of purification or abstinence ritual, with fasting, a change in diet, bathing, or any number of other interventions, most of which are dressed up in mumbo jumbo. They’re not presented as science, because they come from an era before scientific terms entered the lexicon: but still, Yom Kippur in Judaism, Ramadan in Islam, and all manner of other similar rituals in Christianity, Hinduism, the Baha’i faith, Buddhism, Jainism, are each about abstinence and purification (among other things). Such rituals, like detox regimes, are conspicuously and—to some believers too, I’m sure—spuriously precise. Hindu fasts, for example, if strictly observed, run from the previous day’s sunset until forty-eight minutes after the next day’s sunrise.

      Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances. In Angola and Mozambique, purification and cleansing rituals have arisen for children affected by war, particularly former child soldiers. These are healing rituals, where the child is purged and purified of sin and guilt, of the ‘contamination’ of war and death (contamination is a recurring metaphor in all cultures, for obvious reasons); the child is also protected from the consequences of his previous actions, which is to say, he is protected from retaliation by the avenging spirits of those he has killed. As a World Bank report put it in 1999:

      These

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