One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACREBut as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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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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I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me – I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity.
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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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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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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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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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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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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I write about misuses of evidence in plenty of different spheres: scaremongering journalists, obvious quacks and naturopaths, and flaws in the way that evidence is used in mainstream academia, medicine and in (government) policy.
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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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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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