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.
BEN GOLDACREChildren 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.
BEN GOLDACREOne of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACREI think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
BEN GOLDACREI hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
BEN GOLDACREReal science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
BEN GOLDACREDoctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
BEN GOLDACREThere 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 GOLDACREThe 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 GOLDACREI’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.
BEN GOLDACREYou are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
BEN GOLDACRETeaching 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 GOLDACREI agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
BEN GOLDACREThe plural of anecdotes is not data
BEN GOLDACREAnd 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 GOLDACREPositive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
BEN GOLDACREData 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