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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.

Ben Goldacre

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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Daily Excercise Life Lot Obesity Routine Vegetable
You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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Body Mind Play
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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Inspiration Motivation Pain
I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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Bits Complicated Thinking
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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Differences Medicine Teaching
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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Data Fabric Pavement
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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Children Talent
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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Blind Ideas Medicine Spots
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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Change Own Political Require
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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Practice Teacher Teaching
Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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Design Mean Pain
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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Coats Support White
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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Cancer Inspiration Motivation
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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Argument People Reason
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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Book Ends might
I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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Disease Stage Trials

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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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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Popular Authors

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