Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
BEN GOLDACREThere 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.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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