The medicalisation of everyday life

Ben Goldacre's latest article
How can anyone not like Goldacre/BadScience ???

In 2007 the British Medical Journal published a large, well-conducted, randomised controlled trial, performed at lots of different locations, run by publicly funded scientists, that delivered a strikingly positive result: it showed that one treatment could significantly improve children’s antisocial behaviour ....
Did this story get reported as front-page news in the Daily Mail, natural home of miracle cures (and sinister hidden scares)? ....
No. This story was unanimously ignored by the entire British news media, despite their preoccupation with antisocial behaviour, school performance and miracle cures, for one very simple reason: the research was not about a pill. It was about a cheap, practical parenting programme.

Meanwhile, for over five years now, newspapers and television stations have tried to persuade us, with “science”, that fish-oil pills have been proven to improve children’s school performance, IQ, behaviour, attention, and more. As I have documented with almost farcical repetitiveness in this paper, these
....
But I wouldn’t start with molecules, or pills, as a solution to these kinds of problems. The capsules Durham are promoting cost 80p per child per day, while it spends only 65p per child per day on school meals, so you might start there. Or you might restrict junk-food advertising to children, as the government has recently done. You might look at education and awareness about food and diet, as Jamie Oliver recently did very well, without recourse to dodgy pseudoscience or miracle pills.

But you might also step away from obsessing over food just for once and look at parenting skills, teacher recruitment and retention, orsocial exclusion, or classroom size, or social inequality and the widening income gap. Or parenting programmes, as we said right at the beginning. In fact, Durham’s GCSE results, where the “trial” was performed, improved far more in the year before the fish-oil pills were introduced, after a huge input of extra funding and, more importantly, extra effort from local teachers and the community. But the media don’t report stories like that: because “pill solves complex social problem”, even if it’s not true, is a much better angle.

plus he's got a new book out (actually, above is an excerpt), was on Guardian science podcast this week, and did the 2nd part of his Radio4 'placebo' show yesterday.