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.
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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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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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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Transparency and detail are everything in science.
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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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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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