Don't just read the headlines

I'm normally a fan of the BBC, particularly the News website. However, even they let through some sloppy journalism sometimes. There was health story earlier this week about a man in a coma who apparently experienced a miraculous recovery due to some unusual treatment. My radar is well tuned to quackery and poor science, so I took a look.

Magnetic field 'aids coma victim'

Generally, any treatment or intervention that seems to be too good to be true, is just that. Maybe this treatment works, maybe it doesn't. However, this appears to be an unconventional treatment applied to just one person. This is not how a scientific trial of a treatment should work. Reporting on a single case like this is bad enough. What made it worse was that the BBC pulled out a quote from another scientist, Dr John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and stuck that prominently on the article:

I believe that electromagnetic treatments such as deep brain stimulation, direct current transcranial stimulation, and TMS may all have therapeutic promise

This seems to be an endorsement of the treatment. However, when you read the full article, this quote is topped and tailed by the following quotes:

even eight months after a brain injury, spontaneous improvement of this type was "not uncommon".

and

single cases provide very weak evidence except when treatment occurs very late (so spontaneous recovery should be minimal) and the patient is studied for a considerable interval both before and after the treatment.

This is quite a different view and is the reasonable response I would expect from a scientist. Maybe I'm being harsh on the person who wrote the article as they probably wouldn't be responsible for the headline and the quote extraction.

3 for the price of 1

When I checked the BBC News website today, the top 3 emailed news report were all related to religion and none of them showed the subject in a great light.

The first one, here, was the most interesting. It concerns the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known copy of the Bible. Quoting the article,

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today's bible.

It's interesting that some of the comments on the article concede that the bible was written by man, not god, but that it was 'guided' by god. It seems obvious that here's a collection of odds and ends that has been collated over hundreds of years, many years after the events are alleged to have taken place. The crazy part is that some people believe that their version of the book is absolutely 100% true and they will live their life by it. What do they do when different versions of the book appear? Do their heads explode?

The second story was titled 'Pope criticises pursuit of wealth'. I'm not sure which palace the leader of this multi-million (billion?) dollar organisation was speaking from. I hope the credit crunch doesn't effect them too much.

The third story was a bit weird. Another example of religious people wrapping themselves in knots trying to reconcile Bronze Age ideas with the real world. This one was about  ultra-orthodox Jews making sure their mobile phones are kosher. I suppose that any group that deliberately puts itself at a disadvantage will eventually fade away.