Ben Goldacre is supercilious and puritanical — but he’s got a point

Until last week I didn’t have much time for Ben Goldacre, the Guardian journalist and author of Bad Science. He devotes his life to the exposure of snake oil salesmen, whether nutritionists with bogus qualifications or practitioners of alternative medicine, pointing out that there is no scientific basis for their claims. A useful service, to be sure, but he suffers from the Guardian columnist’s vice of being overly puritanical. He combines superciliousness with moral superiority, as if ignorance and stupidity are to be condemned rather than pitied. He is a self-proclaimed atheist, but exhibits a near religious attachment to the empirical method.

So what’s changed? The answer is that my three-year-old son Freddie has come down with chicken pox. I happen to know a bit about the varicella zoster virus because it almost killed my eldest son Ludo. Caroline was exposed to the virus less than a week before he was born which meant she transmitted it in utero without passing on any antibodies.