Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. As of March 2015, he is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, part of the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign to require open science practices in clinical trials...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
years use trials
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.
teaching medicine differences
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.
pain motivation inspiration
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.
details transparency
Transparency and detail are everything in science.
real book writing
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.
ideas blind-spots medicine
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.
leisure-activities talking people
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,
thinking littles sugar
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.
pain mean design
Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn't mean flying carpets exist.
play mind body
You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
motivation cancer inspiration
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
people argument reason
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
pain motivation thumbs
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.
teacher teaching practice
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.