Ben Goldacre Quotes

As a physician, I understand how important it is to collect data on people so we can understand what's happening with them. I will be in the position to help enable that knowledge.

My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

I love the opportunity to help my patients, to work with them to find the best course of action to get them healthy and to give them the information they need to stay healthy.

Nothing in medicine is so insignificant as to merit attention.

Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years.

We need to bridge the gap between the medical libraries and the hospital rooms; take the information out there already, add to it, focus it, harness it - and bring it to the patient who was just diagnosed today.

Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general medicine, via either managed care or large practice settings, is improving by collecting data through electronic records and refining practice based on what works.

I'm not against high-tech medicine. It has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease.

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.

As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.

How can we keep people healthy, and if they get sick, how can we treat them right the first time?

Society as a whole is better off when information is available to the public. Whether you are talking about how to prevent disease, or about who does the best job of treating disease, it is useful to provide as much information to the public as possible.

If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information.

PubMed Central is vital for researchers and the public alike. Only through free access can everyone find out where the cutting edge of research lies. With access to the latest studies, patients and their families have a much-needed piece of the puzzle as they consider treatment options and potential outcomes.

Medical professionals, not insurance company bureaucrats, should be making health care decisions.

The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention.

I'm not a doctor. I just have a tremendous amount of common sense.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

When you walk into a doctor's office, you've got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You've got to ask tough questions, and you've got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.

Well, I would never do a study because I'm a practicing physician. I mean, all I do is treat people.