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This book was excellent, and changed my views about, for example, vitamin pills. I feel guilty that I buy them and then forget to take them, or just don't buy them at all, and 'Bad Science' has convinced me that I don't need to anyway, as the proof just isn't statistically sound. Relief all round! I've always been very interested in health and diet, and was brought up watching programmes such as 'Tomorrow's World', and used to subscribe to 'New Scientist', so I feel that I have a better than average understanding of scientific thinking, although without any scientific training beyong O-level (aged 16). I agree entirely with the following: "This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering. All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside sysems and people." (p.19) So true, and it does often shock me how people are at the mercy of dumbed-down headlines in the press, and how often the medical profession or researchers apparently announce that a certain food causes cancer or protects against it. When one realises that such research may be based on a tiny sample, it makes a mockery of such claims. I was particularly shocked to discover that the much-vaunted fish-oil supplement tests in Durham schools, which has caused so many of my contemporaries to spend small fortunes in capsules for their children, turns out to have very little basis in science. All Dr. Robert Winston's fault that it became so well-known, as he championed it in one of his TV programmes!

The book also made me chuckle to myself, for example when it points out that "surveys... say that doctors are the most trusted of all public figures, and journalists are the least trusted, but that doesn't seem to be the lesson from the media's MMR hoax"! (p.76) I enjoyed both the content and the style of the book, and I shall be looking out for Ben Goldacre's columns in the future, and visiting the website .