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 GOLDACREAs it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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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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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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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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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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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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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.
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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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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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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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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