Junk Science Judo: Self-defense against health scares and scams by Steven
Milloy, Cato Institute, $18.95, ISBN 1930865120
JUDO is the art of self-defence. Steven J. Milloy hijacks the idea to show
that, armed with a dozen basic principles of what makes good and bad science,
the average person should be able to read about a new health scare in the
newspaper and exercise some healthy, defensive scepticism. He began his book in
1996 as a website, and continues to update it with new articles.
It鈥檚 certainly true that media coverage of health news can be lamentable,
from PR-driven claims for wonder foods and new treatment studies to stories
linking cancer to鈥ell, just about every substance on the planet. Milloy lays
out ways to evaluate the latter type of report, from examining internal logic to
assessing statistics. Most of his rules of analysis make perfect sense. Showing
that there was 20 per cent less breast cancer among those who exercised out of
85,364 women studied is not the same thing as showing a correlation between the
two. Testing the cancerous potential of a substance by giving large doses to
rodents doesn鈥檛 prove it causes cancer in humans in much smaller quantities. And
so on.
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Milloy-like, however, do remember that the publisher, the Cato Institute, is
strongly right-wing libertarian: anti-government regulation and pro-market
forces.