75 Quotes by Ben Goldacre

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.

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.

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

Pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science really works.

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

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

Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.

...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.

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.