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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”