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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

Ben Goldacre

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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Book Ends might
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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Coats Support White
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Inspiration Motivation Pain
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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Activities Leisure People Talking
I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Bits Complicated Thinking
I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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Disease Stage Trials
I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.
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Linking New Rule Source Transparently
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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Blind Ideas Medicine Spots
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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Children Talent
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.
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Doctors People Roles
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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Facts Pieces Together
The plural of anecdotes is not data
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Anecdotes Data Plural
I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Bits Complicated Thinking
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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Practice Teacher Teaching
Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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Design Mean Pain
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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Change Own Political Require

You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

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