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.
BEN GOLDACRETransparency and detail are everything in science.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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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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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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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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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 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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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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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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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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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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