Ben Goldacre Quotes & Sayings

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

Sham ultrasound is beneficial for dental pain, placebo operations have been shown to be beneficial in knee pain (the surgeon just makes fake keyhole surgery holes in the side and mucks about for a bit as if he's doing something useful), and placebo operations have even been shown to improve angina. That's — Ben Goldacre

The American Academy of Pediatrics officially supports breastfeeding, but receives about half a million dollars from Ross, manufacturers of Similac infant formula. — Ben Goldacre

Sociologists of regulation - such people exist - talk about something called 'regulatory capture'. This is the process whereby a state regulator ends up promoting the interests of the industry it is supposed to monitor, at the expense of the public interest. It can happen for a number of reasons, and many of them are very human. For example, if you work in the technical business o f drug approval and pharmacovigilance, who can you chat to about your day's work? To your partner, it's all baffling and pedantic; but to the people in the regulatory affairs division of the companies you work with every day, they understand. You have so much in common with them. So industry bodies - not even necessarily the pharmaceutical companies themselves - might offer things as intangible as friendship, and opportunities to socialize. — Ben Goldacre

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into — Ben Goldacre

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. — 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. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

Dr Stewart Wolf took the placebo effect to the limit. He took two women who were suffering with nausea and vomiting, one of them pregnant, and told them he had a treatment which would improve their symptoms. In fact he passed a tube down into their stomachs (so that they wouldn't taste the revolting bitterness) and administered ipecac, a drug that which should actually induce nausea and vomiting. Not only did the patients' symptoms improve, but their gastric contractions - which ipecac should worsen - were reduced. His results suggest - albeit it in a very small sample - that a drug could be made to have the opposite effect to what you would predict from the pharmacology, simply by manipulating people's expectations. In this case, the placebo effect outgunned even the pharmacological influences. More — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

The detox phenomenon is interesting because it represents one of the most grandiose innovations of marketers, lifestyle gurus, and alternative therapists: the invention of a whole new physiological process. In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn't cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the "detox system" in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention. — Ben Goldacre

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

What can you do? There's the rub. The most important take-home message with diet and health is that anyone who ever expresses anything with certainty is basically wrong, because the evidence for cause and effect in this area is almost always weak and circumstantial, and changing an individual person's diet may not even be where the action is. — Ben Goldacre

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

The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is sponsored by Coca-Cola. — Ben Goldacre

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

What is odd, perhaps, is how the primacy of patient autonomy and informed consent over efficacy - which is what we're talking about here - was presumed, but not actively discussed within the medical profession. Although the authoritative and paternalistic reassurance of the Victorian doctor who 'blinds with science' is a thing of the past in medicine, the success of the alternative therapy movement - whose practitioners mislead, mystify and blind their patients with sciencey-sounding 'authoritative' explanations, like the most patronising Victorian doctor imaginable - suggests that there may still be a market for that kind of approach. — Ben Goldacre

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. — Ben Goldacre

Like many doctors, I was frankly traumatized by some of the experiences I had early on in my career. When you lean over a patient in an emergency room, trying to bring a dead body back to life, you are entirely focused on the job at hand. On the other side of a thin curtain, you can hear that person's husband or wife howling and wailing, knowing that the person they loved and lived with for fifty years is dying, begging the staff to do all they can, phoning their children, struggling to speak through tears to form the words and communicate the horror, telling them to come, quickly. I have memories from cubicles that I will never be able to deal with, and they upset me even now. — Ben Goldacre

The plural of anecdotes is not data — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

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

Twenty years ago. First, when you take a static picture of society, people — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transparency and detail are everything in science. — Ben Goldacre

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

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything, as — Ben Goldacre

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

Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

natural frequencies are the only sensible way to communicate risk. — Ben Goldacre

Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work - the components at a molecular level or the behavior of cells in a glass dish - and then pretend it's the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. "This molecular component," they say, with a flourish, "is crucial for collagen formation." And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don't absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there's a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient's pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine. — Ben Goldacre

in 2008, shortly after being elected President, Barack Obama demonstrated to many academics and doctors that he had a clear understanding of the deep problems in health care, by committing to spend $1 billion on head-to-head trials of commonly used treatments, in order to find out which is best. In return he was derided by right-wing critics as 'anti-industry'. — Ben Goldacre

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. — Ben Goldacre

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

... 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

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

There is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries (that — Ben Goldacre

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

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don't understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms - its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world - and channeled into infantile fantasies. "Big pharma is evil," goes the line of reasoning; "therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism." This is probably not helpful. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

A review of trials of acupuncture for back pain showed that the studies that were properly blinded showed a tiny benefit for acupuncture, which was not "statistically significant" (we'll come back to what that means later). Meanwhile, the trials that were not blinded - the ones in which the patients knew whether they were in the treatment group or not - showed a massive, statistically significant benefit for acupuncture. — Ben Goldacre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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