Malcolm Kendrick > 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

“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

“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

“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

“U.S. Panel Says No to Prostate Screening for Healthy Men.”
― 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

“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

“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

“There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit. Ancel Keys, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, 1997”
― Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It

“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

“Most things that matter cannot be measured, and most things that can be measured, don’t matter.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, The Clot Thickens

“my view of medical experts has become extremely jaundiced. At times I feel they are like those highly decorated generals in North Korea with the funny hats. They look splendid, and important, but the only point of their existence is to suppress dissent and keep an idiotic regime in place.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In an initial, randomized controlled study on elderly subjects with increased dementia risk, we showed that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg, vitamin B12 0.5 mg) slowed shrinkage of the whole brain volume over 2 years.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, The Clot Thickens

“If more people die from other causes, then there are fewer people left to die of heart disease. As with throwing people off cliffs to prevent deaths from cancer. If you give people a drug that increases deaths from cancer you cannot then die of heart disease. The reason why the rate of deaths from heart disease went down in the pre-statin cholesterol lowering trials is precisely because the rate of death from other causes went up. This is simple logic. Page one, sentence one.”
― 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 older you get, the more beneficial it is to be overweight.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense

“despite my apparent joviality, I am deadly serious in my belief that the misguided war against cholesterol, using statins, represents something very close to a crime against humanity. So close that you may not be able to spot the difference.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It

“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

“For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong. HL Mencken”
― Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It

“Abstract: We have found that when patients with cancer are pushed off a high cliff this reduces mortality from cancer deaths by 100%. This represents an unprecedented reduction in cancer mortality, and we suggest this technique might be used to reduce cancer deaths around the world. I would follow this with my seminal study on ‘Removing the human brain to prevent strokes.”
― Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense