Quotes About Research

The main reason why clinicians may not diagnose personality disorders is that they think that doing so supports therapeutic pessimism. Recent research has shown this is not true; most patients get better, either with time or with treatment, that the prognosis is actually better than in many patients with severe mood and anxiety disorders.

One should never change one's practice based on a single journal article.

The good news about Cochrane is that most of their conclusions are conservative. Even when data is sufficient for meta-analyses, they often hold back on making recommendations.

The more I learn, the clearer it becomes to me that blaming fatness for sickness is a view unsupported by scientific literature.

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven't the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?

Later, one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn't work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: "It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.

A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.

After twenty years researching this at the highest level, Irving has come to believe that the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is just "an accident of history," produced by scientists initially misreading what they were seeing, and then drug companies selling that misperception to the world to cash in.

This is called "publication bias."7 Of all the studies drug companies carry out, 40 percent are never released to the public, and lots more are only released selectively, with any negative findings left on the cutting room floor.

Standardized schooling too often drains learning of meaning, while progressive schooling tries to infuse it into everything. This is why the best research on this question shows that kids at more progressive schools are more likely to retain what they've learned in the long run, more likely to want to carry on learning, and more likely to be able to apply what they've learned to new problems. These, it seems to me, are among the most precious forms of attention.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level

I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.

Some scientists in the field believe that dreaming somehow helps you to adapt emotionally to waking events.

As John was proving how this effect plays out in humans, other scientists were investigating it in other animals. For example, Professor Martha McClintock separated out lab rats. Some were raised in a cage, alone. Others were raised in groups. The isolated rats developed eighty-four times the number of breast cancer tumors as the rats who had a community.

He learned right away that the drug companies had—for years—been selectively publishing research, and to a greater degree than he expected. For example, in one trial for Prozac, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only twenty-seven of them. Those twenty-seven patients9 were the ones the drug seemed to work for.

When scholars study a thing, they strive To kill it first, if its alive; Then they have the parts and they've lost the whole For the link that's missing was the living soul.

We shouldn't be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community.

When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life

I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

I think that support of this [stem cell] research is a pro-life pro-family position. This research holds out hope for more than 100 million Americans.

One can spend too much of one's life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching, researching, until one is too old to enjoy life.

While it was a very interesting period in my life, I was happy to get back to more direct contact with students in the classroom and in my research projects.

Stem cell research must be carried out in an ethical manner in a way that respects the sanctity of human life.