I don’t believe I ever coined the term book. Not that it makes much difference as far as content is concerned.

The download page (linked in an earlier comment) speaks more about the author than the subject of his writing. I’m afraid that if Walker’s ‘book’* is supposed to be “the case” against Ben, I have better things to do.

* A free PDF download is not automatically a book, despite the page count and the growing popularity of ebooks.

I don’t think that your insult of me is warranted, as I don’t think I performed an ad hominem against you. I did say that the document to which you referred me is from the tinfoil hat brigade. There’s a difference between attacking a person and attacking a work. Mocking a belief is not the same as mocking its believer, and that’s where I suspect a lot of friction comes from between the evidence-based and alternative/fringe communities. It seems the two aspects get confused quite easily when people see their life’s work reduced to rubble in the face of irrefutable, dispassionate evidence. Emotional reaction is a natural by-product.

You must remember that this original article was an explanation of the placebo effect and that you decided to make it personal by referring to a book that attempts to discredit the speaker of the explanation. If Charles Manson were to explain the road rule of stopping at a Stop sign, would that somehow make it any less of a legal requirement?

That you have a problem with Ben Goldacre is obvious; that it doesn’t concern or interest me is, I hope, equally obvious.

Couldn’t agree with you more, unfortunately Dr Goldacre has failed to produce integrity while making his own thrid-rate character assassinations in the past and honesty doesn’t really ring true in his diabolically written littered with inaccuraties MMR piece. In that respect Melanie Philips did a brilliant job in exposing his faults only to find Ben unreluctant to correct himself.

It’s a pity that you yourself, instead of willing to discuss have resulted into your own third-rate character assassinations (tinfoil hat brigade???).

It amazes me how many advocates of alternative medicine or viewpoints resort to claims of Big Pharma/Oil/Agra at the drop of a hat, and then fire off all the usual red flag words and phrases. As the very entertaining Tim Minchin says in Storm: “You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”

Ben Goldacre acknowledges that pharmaceutical companies are rife with problems, and he’s not slow to criticise them himself. There may occasionally be overlap between certain vested interests and the findings of people like Ben, but that doesn’t mean there’s any connection between the two. Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Independent reliable scientists knock unproven treatments as much as those you might consider to be in the pocket of the Evil Empire du Jour.

Scientific method, integrity, honesty, independent peer review and verification, and meta-analyses of reliable trials… that’s where the “truth” is. Not with a collection of anecdotes or “free books” that are merely third-rate character assassinations.