Doctoring Data Quotes

“Even the editors of main journals themselves recognise that peer review may not be the best system ever devised by mankind. Here is what Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, has to say on the matter: “The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“There are many people with an agenda out there, and they will ruthlessly torture statistics until they get the answer they want out of them.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“although association cannot prove causation, a lack of association does disprove causation.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“U.S. Panel Says No to Prostate Screening for Healthy Men.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Rule two: The angrier an expert becomes, the more likely they are to be wrong (when the flak is at its greatest you know you are nearing the target). An angry expert is a wrong expert.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“When you are trying to twist reality through 180 degrees, language ends up strangeled to death gasping its last breath on the floor.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“Trust yourself to understand what is being said. If you cannot, it is not you – it is them.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“Annoyingly trivial diseases can be turned from something mild into life threatening monsters, and so it goes.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“Arguably, the current ascendancy of medical technology is just such a manifestation of social idealism. War is peace: ignorance is strength: freedom is slavery – and now we have the latest example Orwellian doublespeak… Health is disease.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. J Ioannidis”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“Do I really believe that we are heading for some sort of totalitarian state, where dissent against the medical “experts” will be punishable by imprisonment? Well, yes, I do.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data

“The NCEP group of experts, with very strong financial ties to companies marketing statins, concluded that statins should be used ‘aggressively’ in primary prevention. The Cochrane Collaboration group of experts, with no financial ties to industry, concluded that statins should not be used in primary prevention. What”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Their guidelines also carry the force of law in the US. In that, if you don’t follow them, you can be successfully sued for medical malpractice. In addition, such is the power and influence of the US, particularly in the world of medicine, that the NCEP guidelines are usually, if not inevitably, taken up around the globe – with some local adaptations. Indeed, this is exactly what did happen.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“I have never come across a more powerful paper. Every single doctor thought that the quality of life of their patients improved on drugs. All but one of the relatives thought that the quality of life of the patient got worse. In some cases much worse. As for the patients, most of them said quality of life was the same – or better. What”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Many medical facts are not facts in any sense of the word, they have simply been made up.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“This would clear away any objections to using statins in a much bigger market. Basically, all living adults with a cholesterol level above zero.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Basically, many researchers are claiming that they have proved something to be true, but all they have actually done is to manipulate their research in order to confirm what they already ‘knew’ to be true.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Here are just two stand-out facts from a major study in the Annals of Epidemiology entitled ‘Vitamin D for Cancer Prevention.’[3] “Women with higher solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence of breast cancer as those with lower solar exposure.” “Men with higher residential solar exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer.” To put that in simple English, if you spend longer in the sun, you may be far less likely to die of breast and prostate cancer (and lots of other cancers as well, but more on cancer later). But what about the increased risk of dying of skin cancer! I hear you cry. Well, what of it? Around 2,000 people a year die of malignant melanoma in the UK each year. If increased sun exposure were to double this figure, we would have 2,000 more cases. On the other hand, breast cancer kills around 20,000 a year, as does prostate cancer. If we managed to halve the rate of breast and prostate cancer, we would reduce cancer deaths by 20,000 a year. Which is ten times as great any potential increase in deaths from malignant melanoma.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“The sad truth is that most of the advice we are now bombarded with varies from neutral to damaging. In some cases it can be potentially very damaging indeed. Advising people with diabetes to eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet, for example. As a piece of harmful idiocy, this really could hardly be bettered.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“In fact, a study done in Norway a few years ago looked at the issue of cholesterol and blood pressure targets in more detail. Using guidelines developed by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) they established that, by the age of 50, over 95% of people would have a cholesterol level, or blood pressure level, considered high enough to require drug treatment.[2] This is despite the fact that the Norwegians are amongst the healthiest and longest-lived people on the planet. So God knows where that leaves the rest of us.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“The Cochrane collaboration accepts no sponsorship from industry – at all. Not for itself, or its researchers.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“The older you get, the more beneficial it is to be overweight.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“The majority of studies (Framingham aside) find that those with a BMI in the overweight category have the longest life span.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“If you fry a potato in vegetable oil then you are effectively frying a vegetable in the oil of other vegetables. So, where do the unique, health damaging properties, creep in – exactly? On the other hand, if you bake a potato it is good for you… ho, hum. Potatoes, the quantum vegetable. It can co-exist as both healthy and unhealthy simultaneously.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Albert Einstein. He was one of the most scathing critics of Wegener’s hypothesis on tectonic plate movement. I believe that he called it utter nonsense. Not that I hold anything against Einstein. It just proves that even the most ferociously intelligent people can get things horribly wrong.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“Many charities are very clearly in the business of doing good work for starving children in Africa, and suchlike e.g. Oxfam. But when you get to healthcare, the ‘charitable’ aims can become significantly less clear. Heart UK, for example, is ‘The Cholesterol Charity.’ This organisation was presumably set up to help poor starving cholesterol molecules.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“The Cochrane collaboration accepts no sponsorship from industry – at all. Not for itself, or its researchers. (Yet, strangely, they are still considered experts. Did they not know that unconflicted researchers are not truly expert)?”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“This has become so completely ridiculous that, according to the latest American guidelines, if you are a man, by the time you are 63 and you have no risk factors whatsoever for cardiovascular disease: perfect weight; no diabetes; cholesterol optimal; blood pressure super-optimal… You still need to go onto a statin.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“No randomised trial has ever demonstrated any reduction of the risk of either overall or cardiovascular death by reducing systolic blood pressure from our thresholds to below 140 mmHg… It is widely believed that randomized studies have proved that lowering blood pressure is beneficial. Actually, that is not true…” So, there you have it, according to their meticulous analysis, lowering mildly raised blood pressure does not do any good either.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense