My mum insists that we, at home, always cut off the green bit & splice the strawberry in case it had a slug in it.

For Ian Wacogne it’s sitting with his back against a radiator.

Why?

Well, in my case it’s so that you can’t eat a slug … that’s managed to get into the strawberry without having left a hole / magic taped it together afterward .. garbage, yup?

I asked my mum about it. She said that my grandma had told her she had eaten a slug in a strawberry when she was little, but that no, she didn’t remember eating the slug, and actually, on recollection, it was that she had nearly eaten a slug in a strawberry …

Such ‘strawberry stories’ are prevalent and problematic. They exist in clinical medicine, research and publishing. Some we’ve heard recently:

“You can’t publish fetal or animal papers in ADC F&N” … You can

“You need NHS Ethics to involve patients in developing research studies & protocols” … You don’t

“Multi-disciplinary research is never worth the effort” … Nope

Identifying these strawberry stories, and overcoming them should probably be one of the tasks we take on every day. I wish I could point you at high quality evidence of how to do it, but sadly, I can’t.

• Archi