One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACREEat 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.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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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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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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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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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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I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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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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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.
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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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