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.
BEN GOLDACREOne of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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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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I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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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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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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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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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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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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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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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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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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