And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you’ll still be wrong, but you’ll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.
BEN GOLDACREYou are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.
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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.
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The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It’s not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It’s about our beliefs and expectations. It’s about the cultural meaning of a treatment.
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Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.
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Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
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Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.
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As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.
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Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health.
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I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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There is this peculiar blind spot in the culture of academic medicine around whether withholding trial results is research misconduct. People who work in any industry can reinforce each others’ ideas about what is okay.
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