Ben Goldacre Quotes

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

~ Ben Goldacre

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

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

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

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