The Doctor & The Leech

Long ago a travelling physician diagnosed fevers as due to an over-supply of blood, and prescribed leeches as a cure to reduce the excess. ‘Blood-letting’, he said, ‘clears the mind, strengthens the memory, dispels torpor, reduces anxiety and lengthens life.’ He treated many poorly people in this way as he travelled from town to town. Whenever the patients recovered he would boast about the great remedy of the leech. But strangely enough, when they died of their fever, he was never seen at the funerals, for he had already left town.

‘Cryptic, remote, irrelevant and unusable’, writes Tom Bennett on the Times Educational Supplement website: ‘why is so much research in education purest snake oil?’

In March, Ben Goldacre published a treatise on building evidence into education, a long-term aim I share. Dr Goldacre has hundreds of thousands…