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.
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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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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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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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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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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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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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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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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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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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 cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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