There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
The fact that people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis originally and demeaningly called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can’t exercise.
It was first believed to be a mental health disorder where people are scared of doing activity. And patients who said exercising made them worse were treated for hysteria and kinesophobia (fear of exercise).
Now after a decade of so of biomedical research, and after research showing Graded Exercise therapy worked was discredited, we have a steady stream of studies showing different abnormalities and harmful reactions to exercise. Increased autoimmune activation post exercise, microclotting, mitochondial dysfunction, T-cell exhaustion. And most importantly with a dozen or so 2-day CPET studies, we have definitive proof that while healthy controls improve exertional capacity by exercising, these patients are the exact opposite, they worsen.
There’s even been a couple cases of young people 20-30 having a degenerative disease state that killed them.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was originally dismissed by a lot of community doctors as well as more academic medical people. There are still a few who don’t believe in it and dismiss it as a behavioural or attitude problem. Thankfully those people are in the minority now. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they’re not in influential positions.
One surprising contributor to validating ME/CFS is long covid, which seems to be the same condition but catalysed by a different virus.
I’m not a medical expert and could have mistakes in the above post but it’s generally correct.
I struggle with this one, because I think a lot of it comes down to the stigma around mental illness not being treated as real illness. Bear with me.
Hypothetically, if ME was a behavioural issue (i.e. a mental illness) and was treated properly, the person would get better and they’d be happy with the diagnosis as it led to a treatment with stopped their suffering. However, because mental illness is treated so poorly, people want it to be a “real” illness so it gets taken seriously and they can get help.
The medical community has basically been in a battle with their patients on the definition of the syndrome. “Chronic fatigue syndrome” was deemed dismissive, they relabed it “myalgic encephalomyelitis” - big words to mean “spinal/nervous-system issue with muscle soreness”. Honestly, I think the best name is “post-viral fatigue syndrome” which does at least point to a triggering condition.
We still know nothing about why it happens, or how to treat anything except the symptoms. It may very well still be a psychological condition of some kind AND THAT’S OK! The important thing is finding a good treatment and helping people. That will be best done if we follow the evidence rather than letting social dynamics dictate what is acceptable to investigate.
I prefer the term post-viral fatigue too. However it’s incorrect to say that we don’t know if it’s a psychological or behavioural issue. GET and CBT have been thoroughly rubbished as interventions. Not only are they ineffective but they are dangerous.
I get to hear the leading experts* once per year talk about this and they have absolutely honed in on immune response and mitochondrial dysfunction as most probable causes. They are at the stage of proposing diagnostic criteria now. Things could get worse before they get better but we can confidently say that this is a medical condition now.
- I’m thinking of Dr. William Weir and Dr. Nigel Speight, among others.
No one has mentioned The Tomato Effect yet: https://imgur.com/a/suOzNGP
A quote from the article to get a little taste:
[C]olchicum was one of the most clearly efficacious medicines ever discovered [for the treatment of gout]. How could it be discarded after centuries of successful use? As Copeman has said, “this is a strange page in medical history.” He also suggests an explanation. The abandonment of colchicum coincided with the Renaissance. “Then came the Renaissance and the dominance of scholars who, with all this written and practical evidence before them chose to see none of it - their learning seemed like a bandage round their eyes.”
I question most of these examples. The scientific method wasn’t invented yet during the bubonic plague, and how would potential converts even know how long Christian scientists would eventually live? I could argue more, but you basically asked for someone to repeat what you said back to you, so I’ll just put my objection out there and leave.
The germ theory of disease was originally very unpopular with doctors who subscribed to the miasma theory of disease. The idea that a doctor should was their hands before tending to a patient was seen as insulting. Doctors were gentlemen! Their personal hygiene was beyond reproach!
The truly horrifying part is that the guy who proposed it showed it worked, made people do it… and then when he died they stopped and the rates went back. He was committted to an asylum for his effort and died there 2 weeks later, due to…infection.
I read that they would go from performing an autopsy, to delivering a baby, without washing their hands.
It’s the circle of life.
Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.
I think it’s important to detail just how much the scientific community rejected the whole idea of washing your hands. Even though Semmelweis dropped his hospitals maternity mortality rate from 18% to 2%
“In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.”
Holy shit
“This guy washes his hands, clearly he’s crazy, take him out back; if he dies it’s a mercy killing.”
Was actually said by someone at one point.
“Fringe” ideas are discovered to be fact a lot of the time. Nearly everything that is known to the true in the modern world started out as “some quack theory”.
The difference is in how those that think of the “quack theory” go about investigating their theory and respond to the results of that investigation. And whether someone responds honestly or not to that has a lot more to do with them as a person than it does what field of study they come from.
A lot of mathematicians made fun of imaginary numbers when they were first proposed. In fact, the name “imaginary numbers” was actually given by skeptics to make fun of it. It kinda makes sense, imaginary numbers are all based off of a couple fairly strange assumptions, but they make otherwise difficult problems solvable.
The whole thing kinda ruined math though. Nowadays, mathematicians spend their entire careers building frameworks based on silly assumptions in the hopes that one day it’ll be useful.
Reminds me of the Big Bang Theory, which was named that as a joke. The story goes that a Catholic Priest pitched the idea and scientists basically laughed, labeling it a “uniquely catholic idea that is more scripture than reality”
Then they proceeded to look into something called “Steady State Universe” to show that Priest how silly his “Big Bang” was…
Apologies were owed when Big Bang turned out to be true, Einstein had himself photographed with the guy even.
Which is why I find it funny that today the Big Bang Theory is not only used as proof against God’s existence by secular communities, but is fiercely objected too by fundamentalist ones.
This does seem to happen in medicine and nutrition, things that start on the fringe sometimes move to the mainstream. I thought my lunatic ex was out of his mind when he said fasting could heal disease, but it turns out it can, just not in the universal magical way he thought.
Sugar is the reason for the rise of heart disease that was happening in US. John Yudkin was the one to purpose that sugar was dangerous for our bodies and heart plus responsible for obesity but he couldn’t prove it and was criticized by his scientist who were paid by the sugar industry. I forget to state the sugar industry was funding scientist to blame it all on fat. It was a pseudoscience till the 70s and 80s when they found the correlation that Yudkin was missing.
A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.
Lamarckian Theory was criticised for a long time but now we know it isn’t entirely false, epigenetic changes that occur can actually be passed on.
Not to mention, Darwin most likely used Lamarckian theories to shape his own understanding, but didn’t want to give credit because he was English and Lamarck French. Lamarck was the first person to really emphasize the idea of heritability as we know it, describing genes before genetics existed.
is t entirely? or Isn’t entirely?
Lamarckism isn’t entirely false. Edited.
I don’t buy it. Have you ever seen Macron scream? I didn’t think so.
Continental drift was a theory formed in 1912 by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener. Geologists balked at the idea of enormous landmasses moving and said the idea of an Urkonintent was ridiculous. And besides, he was a weatherman, German weatherman, so outside of his field and untrustworthy as a German was considered at the outbreak of WW1.
Then, 50 or so years later his theory was rediscovered when different fields were trying to understand polar magnetic drift evident in iron ore formation. The only explanation that made sense from the evidence is that mountains were not permanent and oceans didn’t exist in some areas - a lot like the land masses moved.
Wegener was eventually vindicated in almost all areas except drift speed. There was an Urkonintent, which has been named Pangaea. The continents do move but because they sit upon plates. He had taught the world about the world but died before anyone thought he was right.
An interesting detail of this story that I only learned recently is that its origin may have been a low-quality translation of his book into english.
The core ideas of Wegener’s theory were in fact generally more well-received by European geologists, with prominent advocates even in the 1920s. It was primarily North American geologists who mocked him and dismissed the theory upon its 1925 American publication, and this may have been partly due to the English translation (from the 1922 German 3rd edition of his book) having a “tone” of stilted presumption and dogmatism that utilitarian translations of German sometimes have.
That tone might explain why the theory (and Wegener himself) was smacked down with such prejudice by American geologists. In particular, we have a talk given by Charles Schuchert at the 1926 Symposium on Continental Drift hosted by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in which he mischaracterized Wegener’s theory as a facile observation of coastline similarity. In fact, Wegener based his argument on deep-sea continental slopes, where edges could be shown to fit more closely, but he didn’t defend himself at the symposium (perhaps again due to the language barrier).
So unfortunately the misunderstanding of continental drift persisted in tangential American geology circles until the 1958 theory of plate tectonics took over while European geologists generally accepted the core ideas early on.
The idea that rocks sometimes fall from the sky.
That’s pretty wild actually. What, actual rocks? Just fall out of the sky?
Meteors. I stole that from “and the earth will shake” (Robert Anton Wilson). There was a description of The Royal College of Astronomy, or somesuch, harrumphing about such a ridiculous, and ignorant superstition.
Wouldnt they be Meteorites if they actually enter our atmosphere and land on earth?
I would say once they hit the ground they are meteorites. But while they are falling they are meteors. Based solely on my own assumptions. Not a hill I care to defend.
