When reading the early chapters of this book, I often found myself smiling – remembering similar conversations I had had with colleagues as we faced overenthusiastic news coverage of new developments, or as we worried about what we termed the “false prophets” of evidence-based medicine (those who neglected the step of evaluating the quality and generalisability of the evidence on which they were basing recommendations). I quickly recognised, however, that Dr Prasad was taking our concerns in a more useful direction: he explains the issues in language that is accessible to people who are not themselves researchers or oncologists, and he organises them in a way that leads to understanding of their origins and to suggestions for improvement.