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.
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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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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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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 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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