One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACREThese corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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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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I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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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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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
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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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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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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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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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Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
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