The doctor will sue you now

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,

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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

...