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.
BEN GOLDACREPositive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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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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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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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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 agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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