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Top Ben Goldacre Quotes

Browse top 38 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ben Goldacre.

Favorite Ben Goldacre Quotes

1. "At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book" ~ Ben Goldacre
2. "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. The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London's Science Museum." ~ Ben Goldacre
3. "More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences." ~ Ben Goldacre
4. "Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers: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 of my arsehole instead?‘Anton', 2006Thank you Anton." ~ Ben Goldacre
5. "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
6. "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
7. "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
8. "The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is sponsored by Coca-Cola." ~ Ben Goldacre
9. "Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it's all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can't even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative' nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy' that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that's still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work." ~ Ben Goldacre
10. "Nutritionists don't stop there, because they can't: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. These new nutritionists have a major commercial problem with the evidence. There's nothing very professional or proprietary about 'Eat your greens,' so they have had to push things further. But unfortunately for them, the technical, confusing, overcomplicated, tinkering interventions that they promote - the enzymes, the exotic berries - are very frequently not supported by convincing evidence." ~ Ben Goldacre
11. "Paul Broca, for example, was a famous French craniologist in the nineteenth century whose name is given to Broca's area, the part of the frontal lobe involved in the generation of speech (which is wiped out in many stroke victims). Among his other interests, Broca used to measure brains, and he was always rather perturbed by the fact that the German brains came out a hundred grams heavier than French brains. So he decided that other factors, such as overall body weight, should also be taken into account when measuring brain size: this explained the larger Germanic brains to his satisfaction. But for his prominent work on how men have larger brains than women, he didn't make any such adjustments. Whether by accident or by design, it's a kludge." ~ Ben Goldacre
12. "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
13. "You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into." ~ Ben Goldacre
14. "These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit." ~ Ben Goldacre
15. "Randomisation is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the seventeenth century by John Baptista van Helmont, a Belgian radical who challenged the academics of his day to test their treatments like blood-letting and purging (based on ‘theory') against his own, which he said were based more on clinical experience: ‘Let us take out of the hospitals, out of the Camps, or from elsewhere, two hundred, or five hundred poor People, that have Fevers, Pleurisies, etc. Let us divide them into half, let us cast lots, that one half of them may fall to my share, and the other to yours … We shall see how many funerals both of us shall have." ~ Ben Goldacre
16. "So, if we're to make any sense of the mess that the pharmaceutical industry - and my profession - has made of the academic literature, then we need an amnesty: we need a full and clear declaration of all the distortions, on missing data, ghostwriting, and all the other activity described in this book, to prevent the ongoing harm that they still cause." ~ Ben Goldacre
17. "It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence - to be surprised by this would be absurd - whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programmes for doctors." ~ Ben Goldacre
18. "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
19. "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." ~ Ben Goldacre
20. "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
21. "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
22. "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
23. "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
24. "Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best." ~ Ben Goldacre
25. "I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs." ~ Ben Goldacre
26. "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
27. "In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry." ~ Ben Goldacre
28. "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
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "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
33. "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
34. "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
35. "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
36. "You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted." ~ Ben Goldacre
37. "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
38. "Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer." ~ Ben Goldacre

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La propia ignorancia sigue creciendo precisamente al mismo ritmo que la propia experiencia."
Author: Anne Michaels

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