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.
BEN GOLDACREI think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.
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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 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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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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