Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

Is coffee good for you? Will sausages kill you? Should you avoid sugar, fat, salt, or all three? 

Is coffee good for you? Will sausages kill you? Should you avoid sugar, fat, salt, or all three? Booked your smear test yet? Checked your balls? Considering bariatric surgery? Are you taking statins like a good boy or girl? ... Or should you just ignore this relentless bombardment of medical advice and remember that no one gets out of life alive.

With the same brilliance and humour that bowled us over in "The Great Cholesterol Con", Dr Kendrick takes a scalpel to the world of medical research and dissects it for your inspection. He reveals the tricks that are played to make minute risk look enormous. How the drug trials are hyped, the data manipulated, the endless games that are played to scare us into doing what, in many cases, makes the most money. After reading this book you will know what to believe and what to ignore. You'll have a much greater understanding of the world of medical research. A world in crisis.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” Dr. Marcia Angell.

About the author

Dr Malcolm Kendrick graduated from medical school in Aberdeen and trained as a General Practitioner in Scotland. After ten years he split his time between General Practice and education. Malcolm currently lives and works in Cheshire in General Practice, Intermediate Care and Out of Hours. Malcolm set up the on-line educational system for the European Society of Cardiology, working with the European Commission and also set up the first website for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK.