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Transparency and detail are everything in science.

Ben Goldacre

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
Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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Inspiration Motivation Real
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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Daily Excercise Life Lot Obesity Routine Vegetable
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
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
The plural of anecdotes is not data
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Anecdotes Data Plural
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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Different Interesting Writing
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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Blood Oxygen Water
I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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Adopt Doctors Drugs Enthusiastic
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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Differences Medicine Teaching
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
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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Argument People Reason
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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Inspiration Motivation Pain
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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Interesting Medicine Trick
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
These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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Bullshit Culture Running

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

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Transparency and detail are everything in science.

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