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 GOLDACREYes. 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.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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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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.
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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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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The plural of anecdotes is not data
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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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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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You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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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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I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.
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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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