Top 42 Quotes & Sayings by Ben Goldacre

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.

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.

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.

In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.

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.

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.

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.

Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.

Bad things happen when problems are protected by a force field of tediousness.

Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science isn't about authority or white coats; it's about following a method. That method is built on core principles: precision and transparency; being clear about your methods; being honest about your results; and drawing a clear line between the results, on the one hand, and your judgment calls about how those results support a hypothesis.

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.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

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.

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.

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.

The plural of anecdotes is not data

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.

I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease

In the past, [medicalization]has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory.

Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn't mean flying carpets exist.

You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

Most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work. But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I've detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don't link to primary sources, I just don't trust you.

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. One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.

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.

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

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.

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.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already. 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. But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

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.

Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position.

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.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

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.

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.