“Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.”

Yes. I’m a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.

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.

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

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.

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.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it’s quite small and contained.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

There is nothing better to display the truth in an excellent light, than a clear and simple statement of facts.

The fact that we don’t read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact – to use Walt Whitman’s definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

There has to a certain responsibility, whether it’s TV news, online news, to sort out opinion from fact.