Once the preserve of the red tops, the use of fake science and fake news stories is spreading to the broadsheets such as The Times. A recent example is the positing of positive thinking by Professor Paul Garner as a cure for Long-Covid, something of a medical scandal.
See the illustration above. It uses a scary headline designed to evoke anxiety and a sense of hopelessness with a set of brain images combined with a cartoon of a coronavirus to give some pretension of scientific authenticity. The dirty yellow tinge on the bottom is all that you need to know.
What a disgrace.
It is what our American friends used to call yellow journalism.
It plays on people’s fears of the unknown.
It creates false hope.
It is an anecdote that carries no weight as scientific evidence.
The article can be fairly labelled as pseudoscientific trash.
Any thinking reader will dismiss the story as nothing more than dangerous and misleadng.
Shame on The Times for publishing this story.
Agree with you. Sending to my spouse a phd biostatistician. I would be interested in his thoughts about meta-analysis being at the top of the pyramid.
Thank you for your comments.