Yes. I’m a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.
BEN GOLDACREAmazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
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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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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 are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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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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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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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 agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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