What is it about the quacks and the charlatans that even the most despicable of their brethren have strange and terrifying names that us ordinary folk can’t aspire to? Here, linked below, is the story of Mathias Rath, as told by one of my biggest British Heroes, Ben Goldacre.

Ben just released a book called Bad Medicine, and he has just released one chapter of it online for people to read and use freely. He was unable to include it in his book because the subject of the chapter, Mr Rath, was suing him at the time. Now that Ben has won the lawsuit he’s letting us lucky inhabitants of the blogosphere read the censored material. Go on, enjoy. You’ll like it and you’ll learn something.  Rath is one of those con-men who have a body count notched in the side of his debit card.  It’s worth reading about why.  I’ve included a small excerpt from Ben Goldacre’s chapter below:

Rath’s company ran clinics reflecting these ideas, and in 2005 he decided to run a trial of his vitamins in a township near Cape Town called Khayelitsha, giving his own formulation, VitaCell, to people with advanced AIDS. In 2008 this trial was declared illegal by the Cape High Court of South Africa. Although Rath says that none of his participants had been on anti-retroviral drugs, some relatives have given statements saying that they were, and were actively told to stop using them.

Tragically,Matthias Rath had taken these ideas to exactly the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa at the time, was well known as an “AIDS dissident”, and to international horror, while people died at the rate of one every two minutes in his country, he gave credence and support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who variously claim that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV, that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on.

Published by Harper Perennial 2009.

You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit – so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net

This is an extract from
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre

~Chrispian