Its mission, according to
Sir Iain Chalmers, the
Cochrane Collaboration co-founder who’s co-leading it, is to teach children to "detect bullshit when bullshit is being presented to them."
The researchers designed teaching materials, lesson plans, and cartoon-filled workbooks for kids about the reliability of medical treatments. And they’ve tested them out on more than 15,000 kids in a randomized controlled trial in Uganda.[...]
This study could be the beginning of a recipe book for how create little armies of bullshit detectors. These bullshit detectors would, in theory, be able to tell the difference between a helpful kind of doctor and a Dr. Oz, a useful medicine and a harmful one, and whether a study was designed to give reliable answers.[...]
The bible of health bullshit detection
One of the indispensable readings for anyone interested in evidence-based medicine is
Testing Treatments(downloadable for free). The basic idea behind the book, as Chalmers puts it, is that "you don’t need to be a scientist to think critically and ask good questions." In plain language, he and the book’s co-authors explain concepts people need to understand in order to sort reliable health advice from nonsense.
In that spirit, around the time a new edition of the book was published in 2012,
Andy Oxman, a co-investigator on the Uganda trial and a research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, approached Chalmers and said, "Why don’t we fish out the key concepts in
Testing Treatments and see whether we can teach them to primary school children in Uganda?"[...]
"We are trying to teach children that stories are usually an unreliable basis for assessing the effect of treatments," Nsangi explained, adding that stories amount to anecdotal evidence. The kids are also learning to watch out for
the perverting effects of conflicts of interest, and to recognize that all treatments carry both harms and benefits and that large, dramatic effects from a treatment are really, really rare.
