Science is about embracing your knockers

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• Format Texts
• Language/s English
• Target Audience Self-directed learning
• EBM Stage 0 - Why EBM?
• Duration <5 mins
• Difficulty Intermediate

Key Concepts addressed

• 1-1a Treatments can harm

Details

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 November 2010

If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. Then people discuss what they think this all means in the real world.

Maria Hatzistefanis is a star of lifestyle pages and the owner of Rodial, the cosmetics company who sell a product called “Boob Job” which they claim will give you a “fuller bust” “increase the bust size” and “plump up the décolleté area” with “an instant lifting and firming effect”, and an increase of half a cup size in 56 days. Or rather an increase of “8.4%”. It’s all very precise.

Now I’m not going to lose a great deal of sleep over anybody who buys a magic cream to make their breasts grow bigger. What worries me is that Maria Hatzistefanis’s company are now threatening a doctor with a libel case, simply for daring to voice doubts over these claims.

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