These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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 hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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