Top 60 Ben Goldacre Quotes
#1. Doubt has also been cast on the value of McKeith's certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, especially since Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre managed to buy the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.
Ben Goldacre
#2. There are many ways in which journalists can mislead a reader with science: they can cherry-pick the evidence, or massage the statistics; they can pit hysteria and emotion against cold, bland statements from authority figures.
Ben Goldacre
#3. The real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die
there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them - but that they systematically the public's understanding about the very nature of evidence.
Ben Goldacre
#4. In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.
Ben Goldacre
#5. Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn't mean flying carpets exist.
Ben Goldacre
#6. people who are incompetent suffer a dual burden: not only are they incompetent, but they may also be too incompetent to assay their own incompetence, because the skills which underlie an ability to make a correct judgement are the same as the skills required to recognise a correct judgement.
Ben Goldacre
#7. I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
Ben Goldacre
#8. 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 Goldacre
#9. 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 Goldacre
#10. Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market, and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.
Ben Goldacre
#11. If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed.
Ben Goldacre
#12. The American Academy of Pediatrics officially supports breastfeeding, but receives about half a million dollars from Ross, manufacturers of Similac infant formula.
Ben Goldacre
#13. scaremongers - who unquestioningly champion anecdotal data, while meticulously examining every large, carefully conducted study on the same subject for any small chink that would permit them to dismiss it entirely.
Ben Goldacre
#14. Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.
Ben Goldacre
#15. The value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It's also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view.
Ben Goldacre
#16. 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
#17. You will do it because you know that knowledge is beautiful, and because if only a hundred people share your passion, that is enough.
Ben Goldacre
#18. Transparency and detail are everything in science.
Ben Goldacre
#19. 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.
Ben Goldacre
#20. Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme.
Ben Goldacre
#21. Torture the data, and it will confess to anything, as
Ben Goldacre
#22. 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
#23. Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position.
Ben Goldacre
#24. Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
Ben Goldacre
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
Ben Goldacre
#28. At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis - about which more later - but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you.
Ben Goldacre
#29. Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.
Ben Goldacre
#30. I'd like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that 'Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.' What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out off my arsehole instead?
Thank you. Anton.
Ben Goldacre
#31. The current regulations -- for companies, doctors and researchers -- create perverse incentives; and we'll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice
Ben Goldacre
#32. There is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries (that
Ben Goldacre
#34. This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering.
Ben Goldacre
#35. You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
Ben Goldacre
#36. 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.
Ben Goldacre
#37. Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.
Ben Goldacre
#38. ... sometimes you need to be imaginative about what kinds of research you do, compromise and be driven by the questions that need answering, rather than the tools available to you.
Ben Goldacre
#39. There is actually quite a lot of crossover between the quacks and drug companies. They use the same tricks and tactics to bamboozle people into buying their pills, but drug firms can afford to use slightly more sophisticated versions.
Ben Goldacre
#40. 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
#41. You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into
Ben Goldacre
#42. Twenty years ago. First, when you take a static picture of society, people
Ben Goldacre
#43. Bad things happen when problems are protected by a force field of tediousness.
Ben Goldacre
#44. Problems in medicine do not mean that homeopathic sugar pills work; just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn't mean that magic carpets really fly.
Ben Goldacre
#45. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.
Ben Goldacre
#46. I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease
Ben Goldacre
#47. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles and more. You'll enjoy it: I've had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation.
Ben Goldacre
#48. If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have.
Ben Goldacre
#49. We hope that this will help reduce the chances of real-world outcomes, like heart attack and death, both of which occur at a higher rate in people with
Ben Goldacre
#50. natural frequencies are the only sensible way to communicate risk.
Ben Goldacre
#51. When you prescribe a new drug, often you are prescribing something that has only been tested in a few thousand people for a very short period of time, perhaps only six months, and that's not long enough to know whether there are any medium- or long-term side effects.
Ben Goldacre
#52. The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is sponsored by Coca-Cola.
Ben Goldacre
#53. 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
#54. You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
Ben Goldacre
#55. Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
Ben Goldacre
#56. There is an almost linear relationship between the methodological quality of a homeopathy trial and the result it gives. The worse the study - which is to say, the less it is a "fair test" - the more likely it is to find that homeopathy is better than placebo.
Ben Goldacre
#57. 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
#58. In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence.
Ben Goldacre
#59. These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
Ben Goldacre
#60. 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.
Ben Goldacre
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