Television is blamed for an awful lot these days: street violence, bad manners, bad eyesight, bad brains, etc. In some ways this is true, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, 90% of TV programming is utter crap (Big Brother, [somewhere]'s Got Talent, soaps, any celebrity gossip shows).
However, TV can also be a force for good. There are (at least in the UK, I'm not sure about elsewhere) some truly brilliant science-based, informative shows. Last week I watched one of these, and finally thought 'we're making progress'. In the BBC's 'Professor Regan's Medicine Cabinet', the eponymous Imperial College professor puts various medical myths, from health checks to branded drugs, to the test. The show explains the placebo effect and other important scientific concepts in an easy-to-understand manner, and Regan certainly seems to have her head screwed on air-tight when it comes to scientific rigour (even sending off various homeopathy papers for a thorough statistical analysis).
For someone like me who always follows the science, and doesn't swallow anything (both literally and metaphorically) without seeing the proof, it felt good that proper scientific procedure had come to prime time TV. If at least one person watched the show and stopped using 'complementary' therapies, it did some good.
For those of you in the UK, you can watch the show (and the previous one about diets) on the BBC iPlayer. Those elsewhere with a bit of technical savvy could always google for 'uk proxy' and go from there.
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