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 GOLDACREI think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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 agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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