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The greatest tragedy about Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science is that the people who need to read it the most won’t. It’s a sustained argument against nonsense masquerading as science, but as Goldacre himself says: “You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.” And this is an eminently reasonable book.

I like science. I’m not a scientist, but I like to think that I understand it pretty well for a non-scientist. Most of what gets taken for science is actually engineering. The Large Hadron Collider? Engineering. The space programme? Engineering. It’s the process of ideas being tested that give us the ability to build things like the LHC and space rockets and mobile phones and medicines. Science is essentially the set of methods we’ve developed over the last thousand or so years to test ideas rigourously. Humans are easily fooled and science is the best way we know how to not decieve ourselves.

Goldacre uses subjects like homoeopathy and nutritionists to demonstrate the many ways in which people fool themselves and fool others. He effectively takes apart the claims of homoeopaths and nutritionists like Gillian McKeith as a demonstration of how such claims can be taken apart. In other words, it’s a training manual to spot this kind of nonsense-presented-as-fact and argue against it effectively. It’s the exact reverse of these self-appointed authorities’ intent – Goldacre is trying to empower the reader, not deceive them. Because Goldacre’s background is in medicine, his examples are exclusively health related, but health is the field of science that most directly impacts people’s lives.

This is really only one of two threads that the book is weaved from; the other is a critique of the media’s tacit role in the acceptance and promotion of nonsense, the misrepresentation and dumbing down of science in public life. See, for example, Language Log‘s many posts about the poor science reporting of the BBC, and Goldacre’s own blog for many, many examples. This culminates in an analysis of the 9 year MMR vaccine debacle, where British media – and especially British newspapers – waged a campaign against the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism for the best part of nine years, on the basis of very little and very poor evidence.

Goldacre doesn’t take an entirely uncritical view of science. He draws attention to the ways that scientists have screwed up, making the wrong decisions. He also examines the way that science is sometimes distorted by powerful financial interests. The point is that these are things that scientists have fixed or want to fix, whereas the promoters of nonsense have no such desire.

Much of the material has its roots in Goldacre’s Guardian column of the same name, but it’s more of a distillation of it than a compilation. In many ways it’s a manifesto. Bad Science is one of the best science books I’ve ever read. It’s stunningly relevant, clearly written and often funny – although as a humanities graduate, I’m not entirely sure that Goldacre’s ire against humanities graduates is entirely warranted. Nevertheless, it explains what science is and why it does it far more clearly than any science lesson or textbook. It’s important stuff. If you know why homoeopathy and vitamin pills and detox are bad things then you should read this book to better understand the extent of the problem. And if you take homoeopathic remedies and your multivitamins and follow a detox plan twice a year, you should read it to understand why you’re wrong.