“I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease”

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.

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.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.

I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

The plural of anecdotes is not data

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.

But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

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.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

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.

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.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

You can tell on-stage when a joke’s starting to lose its pop. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to hear it anymore; it means I don’t want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they’ve never heard.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

People, when they go on stage, tend to be animated and try to force things out instead of relaxing and bringing it in.

We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.