“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.”

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.

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.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.

I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

The plural of anecdotes is not data

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.

But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

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.

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.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

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.

Love is the medicine that saves from disease.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers.

The best doctors give the least medicines

We look at science as the ultimate answer for everything yet we are really messy organisms and when the two collide in the upper echelons of medicine you think science will prevail but it’s not always that way.

One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.

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.

Money brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends.