The doctor will sue you now
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THE DOCTOR WILL
SUE YOU NOW
by Ben Goldacre
This is an extract from
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre
Published by Harper Perennial 2009. You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it,
reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit –
so that people know they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net
ISBN 978-0-00-728487-0
This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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The Doctor Will Sue You Now
This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book,
because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the
vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally,
and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only
mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public
that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they
would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in
the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously
paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his
case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has
paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow.
Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time
off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with
endlessly cross-referenced court documents.
On this last point there is, however, one small consolation,
and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more
about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My
notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room
where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man
himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the
fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I
should also mention, is available free online for anyone who
wishes to see it.
Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost
academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been
interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad
science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious
academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling,
and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand,
these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of
our decadent Western context into a situation where things
really matter?
In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment.
AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people
have died from it already, three million in the last year alone,
and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it
kills 300,000 people every year: that’s eight hundred people
every day, or one every two minutes. This one country has 6.3
million people who are HIV positive, including 30 per cent of
all pregnant women. There are 1.2 million AIDS orphans under
the age of seventeen. Most chillingly of all, this disaster has
appeared suddenly, and while we were watching: in 1990, just 1
per cent of adults in South Africa were HIV positive. Ten years
later, the figure had risen to 25 per cent.
It’s hard to mount an emotional response to raw numbers,
but on one thing I think we would agree. If you were to walk
into a situation with that much death, misery and disease, you
would be very careful to make sure that you knew what you
were talking about. For the reasons you are about to read, I
suspect that Matthias Rath missed the mark.
This man, we should be clear, is our responsibility. Born and
raised in Germany, Rath was the head of Cardiovascular
Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto in California,
and even then he had a tendency towards grand gestures,
publishing a paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
in 1992 titled ‘A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular
Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a
Cause for Human Mortality’. The unified theory was high-dose
vitamins.
He first developed a power base from sales in Europe, selling
his pills with tactics that will be very familiar to you from
...