Ben Goldacre's falsehoods on Bad Science about dental amalgam

You have to understand that just because Ben Goldacre of Bad Science correctly debunks the pseudoscience that is homeopathy, and makes himself out as specialising in debunking pseudoscience, it does not follow that that is what Mr Goldacre really is up to. The real criterion for approval by Mr Goldacre appears to be not whether something is pseudo or not; rather it is whether it is corporate establishment or not.

For instance in one of his articles Mr Goldacre would have you believe that “scare stories” about mercury fillings “come round every few years”. And yet this is an obscene falsehood, presented in an offensively sneering manner. The reality of dental mercury amalgam is that there has long been decisively strong evidence of harmfulness, and the defenders such as Mr Goldacre merely pretend that that evidence does not exist. In this they are either liars or else they must be stupendously incompetent to an extent that I personally find beyond credibility (though I'll leave for you to judge for yourself).

For instance I wrote to the Chief Dental Officer pointing out the 26 studies of 6000 patients, showing exceptional benefits from amalgam removal. These cannot be merely dismissed as placebo effects. I sent him these papers here: http://www.iaomt.org/articles/category_view.asp?intReleaseID=214&month=10&year=2006&catid=35

The CDO wrote back asserting that all the studies I had cited had been “superceded” by the SCENIHR report. And yet when you search through the 72 pages of that report those 26 studies are
NOT EVEN MENTIONED. And it turns out that a whole lot more is NOT EVEN MENTIONED by scenihr, as indicated in Mats Hanson's critique obtainable at http://www.mercurymadness.org/viewdata.aspx?sectionid=1&dataid=124.

And that lot is NOT EVEN MENTIONED by the supposed evidence-based expert Ben Goldacre too.

Subsequently Goldacre wrote another article in which he sneered his contempt for those who selectively cite only the evidence that suits them. In the comments on his badscience blog the 14th comment pointed out Goldacre's own selectivity in that previous article. You can see that Goldacre ignored that important challenge and instead carried on discussing philosophy with his acolytes. (Some of the acolytes meanwhile posted false excuses about there supposedly being no need to mention the counter evidence on the pseudo-grounds that it could supposedly be dismissed as just placebo anyway. In reality people have had very longstanding major illnesses suddenly and permanently cured by these "placebo" effects of amalgam removal. Not to mention all the other evidence Goldacre pretends away.)

More of the cheap, pseudo-authoritative character of Ben Goldacre can be inferred from the prominent graphic on his site, of a sour-faced plastic duck with the word "Nutritionist" below it. It's well-known that the big pharma industry has been engaging for decades in dirty-tricks warfare against nutrition because it provides cheap alternatives which work much better than their own drugs. By means of that graphic, Ben Goldacre cheaply evades the real question of whether nutritionists (and by explicit implication all nutritionists) are "quacks", and instead appeals to mindless kneejerk irrationality. He must presumably wish to include the twice-Nobel-Prizewinner Linus Pauling, who wrote much of the chemistry a-level textbook before moving on to nutrition research, within that quackery insinuation.

I myself, as one of many victims of the dental mercury quackery which Ben Goldacre defends, have survived that poisoning so long only thanks to extensively applying the nutrition that Ben Goldacre here insinuates to be quackery itself. The man stinks to hell. I await his apology and resignation from his career of sham expertise.