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.
BEN GOLDACREReal science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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I write about misuses of evidence in plenty of different spheres: scaremongering journalists, obvious quacks and naturopaths, and flaws in the way that evidence is used in mainstream academia, medicine and in (government) policy.
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One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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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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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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If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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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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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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