Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.

The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment.

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.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease

Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.

Most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work. But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I've detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don't link to primary sources, I just don't trust you.