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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.

Ben Goldacre

Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
BEN GOLDACRE

Inspiration Motivation Real
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Practice Teacher Teaching
Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
BEN GOLDACRE

Data Decision Doctors
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

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

Linking New Rule Source Transparently
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Different Interesting Writing
You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
BEN GOLDACRE

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

Book Real Writing
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 GOLDACRE

Activities Leisure People Talking
I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
BEN GOLDACRE

Adopt Doctors Drugs Enthusiastic
Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
BEN GOLDACRE

Design Mean Pain
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
BEN GOLDACRE

Cancer Inspiration Motivation
Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
BEN GOLDACRE

Facts Pieces Together
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Book Ends might
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Data Fabric Pavement
I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
BEN GOLDACRE

Bits Complicated Thinking

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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