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 GOLDACREDoctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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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.
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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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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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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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 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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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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You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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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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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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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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Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
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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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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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