Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
BEN GOLDACREI think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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 hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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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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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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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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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.
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There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they have much in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learned through experience; but both can be informed by the experience of others.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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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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Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.
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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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