By Peter C Gøtzsche, Professor emeritus, Institute for Scientific Freedom

Dieting to lose weight is a big industry, but much of the advice offered is not evidence-based. Being a scientist, I reasoned that, to lose weight, you only need to count your calorie intake and expenditure, put it in a spreadsheet, and ensure there is a deficit every day. I shall explain how to do it and provide a spreadsheet you can use. Read more.

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Peter C Gøtzsche, Institute for Scientific Freedom

If you get cancer, one of the most important questions is to decide if you should accept or decline chemotherapy. By far most patients accept chemotherapy, likely because they think that if it wasn’t worthwhile, it wouldn’t be offered.

This is a mistake. …

Should I get chemotherapy for cancer? Probably notRead More »

In my book, I describe what is wrong with the psychiatry textbooks used by students of medicine, psychology and psychiatry. Much of what is claimed amounts to scientific dishonesty. I conclude that biological psychiatry has not led to anything of use, and that psychiatry as a medical specialty is so harmful that it should be disbanded.

In a book review that just came out in the journal Psychosis, Tom Federn, licensed clinical social worker from New York, notes how shocked he became when he read my book. He feels ashamed to be part of a profession involving the gross mistreatment of so-called psychiatric patients. His book review is here.

Sådan sagde min ellers afdæmpede bankrådgiver, efter at YouSee havde chikaneret mig så meget, at jeg ville sikre mig, at de ikke kunne trække et beløb, jeg ikke skyldte dem, via betalingsservice med tilbagevirkende kraft.

Jeg opsagde i en e-mail mit telefon- og bredbåndsabonnement 22/8 til udløb 30/9, men fik til svar, at jeg ”ønskede” at opsige et af deres produkter. Nej, jeg havde opsagt det!

YouSee’s forretningsmetoder ligner et bevidst forsøg på at franarre kunderne penge, de ikke skylder, ved at sprede et røgslør, der forvirrer kunderne og er fuldstændig gakket. Den slags skal udstilles, hvilket jeg hermed har gjort. Læs mere.

By Peter C Gøtzsche

Two weeks ago, US epidemiologist Harvey Risch published a paper criticising evidence-based medicine (EBM) and its reliance on randomised clinical trials (RCTs) quite substantially. At the same time, he praised observational studies based on arguments that are untenable.

After Gordon Guyatt had coined the term EBM in the early 1990s, some prominent epidemiologists provided similar criticisms of it as Risch. It is therefore worthwhile to discuss Risch’s key arguments. …

Unjustified attack on randomised trials and evidence-based medicine from an epidemiologistRead More »

Inserting stents into people with chest pain during exercise is big business. But is it also beneficial for the patients? This is doubtful. The reliability and usefulness of exercise stress tests and coronary angiography is also doubtful in relation to deciding whether a patient needs stents or not. As this will surprise most people, I have decided to republish a section about these issues in my 2019 book, Survival in an overmedicated world: Find the evidence yourself. You can read this section here.

By Peter C Gøtzsche

9 Dec 2022

Many alternative practitioners claim that the water in homeopathic drops can remember what was once in it, even though there isn’t a single active molecule left after all the dilutions. In 2019, national Danish TV broadcast similar nonsense in the programme, “The secrets of water,” under the heading Nature, Science and Technology.

It was claimed that water flowing past a closed container of “Grander water” extracted from a mountain spring in the Alps can render the water more orderly and a better cleaning agent. The miraculous alp water, which is sold in a household version for the handsome sum of €1000, defies the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy (the degree of disorder) in a closed system will always increase with time unless you add energy to the system.

Some Germans claimed that with the power of thought you can influence water in a closed container several thousand kilometers away. This was documented by graphs that ran roughly in parallel until people started thinking about the container. Then the graphs diverged, quite considerably so.

In the broadcast, there were interviews with Danish researchers who came up with some generalities that if this were true, the perceptions in the natural sciences would need to be revised. Sure, and if one day we saw a man from space kidnapping people from Earth and transporting them away in a spaceship, so-called alien abduction, there is also something we need to revise.

Science is under attack. It is not helpful that national TV stations, whose economy all citizens need to contribute to involuntarily, publishes utter nonsense under the guise of scientific credibility. The astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a whole book about popular nonsense, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. We should take care that this candle does not get blown out.

We cannot justify banning female circumcision while allowing male circumcision. There is no relevant ethical difference, and none of the arguments offered in favour of male circumcision at a hearing in the Danish parliament in November 2014 held water. I have translated an article I published in 2015 about the hearing because it is still highly relevant. Genital mutilation of boys must stop in all countries and doctors should refuse to perform any such barbaric operations unless medically indicated, which they very rarely are. Read more

By Peter C Gøtzsche

The name non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) suggests that NSAIDs reduce inflammation like corticosteroids do, but this is not correct. In a meta-analysis of the placebo-controlled trials, they did not reduce the swelling of finger joints measured by jeweller rings in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. And in a placebo-controlled trial in 173 patients with acute ankle distortions, they did not reduce the oedema. In this trial, the patients were also randomised to a group that was instructed to immobilize the foot and was given crutches and to a group that was instructed to walk as normally as possible despite the pain. Mobilisation quickly reduced the oedema. After 2-4 days, the difference in volume between the healthy and the injured foot was 42 mL when the patients were mobilised compared to using crutches (P = 0.01). In contrast, there was no significant effect of naproxen (P = 0.42; difference 11 ml compared with placebo, which could simply be due to more mobilisation because of less pain). Thus, mobilisation was anti-inflammatory, which naproxen wasn’t, and it also led to much faster recovery, 44% versus 16% had recovered after 2-4 days (P = 0.0006). I have spared the internal company report of our study, which is where these data are. The company resisted to have these embarrassing data published. It is rare to name drugs after what they are not (non-steroidal), but this was a carefully planned marketing trick that has worked very well for the drug companies while it has killed hundreds of thousands of patients who didn’t really need such a drug but could have done well on paracetamol or no treatment.

In June 2021, comedian Jon Stewart appeared on Steven Colbert’s late night show. The video on YouTube is remarkable. Colbert tries to stop Stewart when he, a couple of minutes into the show, wants to discuss the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and not only suggests it was a lab leak but also that the pandemic was likely caused by science. It is also remarkable that YouTube, which has removed a lot of content that to a lesser degree went against the official Chinese narrative that the virus originated in nature, did not remove this video. I have written a transcript of the video. About making Frankenstein new corona viruses in gain-of-function experiments, like the one recently created in Boston that killed 80% of the mice, Stewart says: The final words ever spoken on this Earth will be a scientist’s musing, “Huh, it worked.”