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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.

Ben Goldacre

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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Inspiration Motivation Pain
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
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
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
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
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
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
Transparency and detail are everything in science.
BEN GOLDACRE

Details Everything Transparency
The plural of anecdotes is not data
BEN GOLDACRE

Anecdotes Data Plural
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
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE

Argument People Reason
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

Daily Excercise Life Lot Obesity Routine Vegetable
One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACRE

Interesting Medicine Trick
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Blind Ideas Medicine Spots
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 think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
BEN GOLDACRE

Bits Complicated Thinking

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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