Back at the end of January this year, I was asked to give a presentation at the University of Ottawa Health Symposium. The attendees were people who were interested in becoming health professionals. I was told that I could present anything that I wished.

I decided to give an well-received talk entitled “A Tale of Woo: Communicating With Your Patients in the Land of Celebrities, Google, and Pseudoscience”. My reason for doing so was that as physicians, we meet people who come into our offices with information or health claims that they have read, heard, or seen presented by various media sources and social media outlets that more often than not delves into anecdote, fear, and misinformation. This has the potential to take advantage of people who may be vulnerable because illness or are looking for answers when their doctor does not have one.

I wanted the students to have a means of gaining an understanding about how the public perceives science and medicine reporting. It would be an advantage to have a toolbox that will help them recognize the common logical errors in an argument, the buzz words meant to put you on the defensive, how to deal with anti-Western bias (we do everything wrong), and how to critically evaluate news reports from all sources. In future posts, I will get into much more detail about each of these.

The list that follows includes the critical material necessary to start understanding the interrelationship between critical thinking, modern medicine and scientific principles, and debunking/critically assessing claims that seem to come out of nowhere. This is especially important given that we are seeing the results of anti-vaccination campaigns and subsequent harm to children as one example.

I have included links for all of these websites and links in the book list to interviews I had with some of the authors on my radio show Sunday House Call.

There is a tendency to polarize issues and talk through each other. This is why it is important to understand where people are coming from and that through respectful discussion, we might be able to change opinion (okay, you can snicker now).

Books (links are embedded in the titles)

• The Cure For Everything By Timothy Caulfield
• Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? By Timothy Caulfield
• Do You Believe In Magic?: The Sense And Nonsense Of Alternative Medicine By Dr. Paul Offit
• Bad Science By Dr. Ben Goldacre
• Bad Pharma By Dr. Ben Goldacre
• An Apple A Day By Dr Joe Schwarcz
• The Diet Fix By Dr. Yoni Freedhoff
• Mindless Eating by Dr. Brian Wansink
• Testing Treatments – Free Download At Testing Treatments.Org
• Salt, Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us – Michael Moss
• Risk: The Science And Politics Of Fear By Dan Gardner
• The Critical Thinkers Dictionary By Robert Carroll

Websites

• Badscience.net
• The Cochrane Collaboration
• Compound Interest
• Consumerlab.com
• HealthNewsReview.org
• National Council Against Health Fraud
• NHS choices
• Science-based medicine
• Quackwatch
• Testingtreatments.org
• Uptodate.com
• Weighty Matters

And the John Oliver smack down of Dr. Oz