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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember the whole “trees communicate” thing, that one’s kinda recent if I remember correctly. Like it was after the Avatar movie came out, which really fanned the flames of ridicule.
Yellowstone burned in 1988 because we kept putting out fires. My forestry professor (only 3-years later, he was there) said the deadfalls were often 10’ high and some higher.
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.
Plate techtonics weren’t scientific consensus until 1968-1975 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0040195177901974?via%3Dihub
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.
That’s so American it’s almost comical
And if you think that’s a weird hangup from the past, remember that Americans, including very educated ones, are still currently mad (like, actually mad) that Pluto got demoted to Dwarf Planet. Because it’s the only “planet” discovered by Americans.
Pluto can be a planet if you want but then so are Ceres, Eris, Gonggong, and the several other dwarf planets, else your argument stands on nothing more than naked chauvinism. Which is usually how it goes.
By contrast I never personally heard anyone in the francosphere seriously complain about Pluto’s status, nevermind keep including it in the list of planets as an act of defiance. Because who cares (the Americans, that’s who).
dude, the Smithsonian has an article about how Benjamin Franklin invented the public library, I kid you not
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.
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.
Like hormesis works in reverse for them
That’s really interesting. Can you provide some sources?
I also have ME, but learning about it, bit by bit, with all the confusion/etc out there is really tiring!
The idea that rocks sometimes fall from the sky.
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.
deleted by creator
It’s the circle of life.
Wearing masks to not catch diseases when treating patients.
Lmao geology oddly enough
edit: I recommend “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, super fun and goes in to a lot of things relevant to this post.
“Rocks don’t exist.”
that’s just what the strata companies want you to think.
Two others that really opened my eyes to the history of geological study are The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester, and The Great Quake by Henry Fontain.
Both very informative and entertaining
“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.
I’ll take it back pretty far and mention the Copernican Revolution.
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.
You’ve led me to quite a Christian Scientist rabbit hole, but I cannot for the life of me find the requirement to start smoking. Rereading, is that maybe a typo that should’ve said they required people to stop smoking? I can’t find that either, but it seems to make more sense to me.
You can’t stop smoking until you start smoking…
It absolutely was a typo, everyone thought smoking was good for you, but this crazy lady said “Jesus said we shouldn’t smoke if we wanna awaken our God powers!”
And… people believed her because when they stopped smoking they stopped dying.
Funnily enough, the woman in question used to practice Homeopathy and when coming up with her Christian Science ideas she sought to prove it by replacing the homeopathy meds of someone in her care with fakes. Which of course were just as effective, proving that
_Homeopathy doesn’t workhe activated his Hamon Breathing and cured himself of Dio’s evil poisons.Thanks for clarifying and just to make sure I didn’t misrepresent myself, I was absolutely not trying to bust your chops. I could see it going either way given the time period.
Same. All it made me think of was that show The Leftovers (I think??) where you just see clumps of people staring at other characters while dressed all in white and chain-smoking.
Yeah it was a typo…
The movement claimed that God made man in his image, therefore man was divine and had been tricked by the illusion that is the material world into creating his own problems and illnesses.
So church members in order to correct this error and cure these mental diseases were required to abstain from substances (anything besides food and beverage basically), as taking them meant you were “reinforcing the delusion that the material world was real.”
This meant people couldn’t take vitamins, caffine, alcohol, medicine (morphine was the exception because morphine was used when the founder originally “discovered the Christian Science power”), and they couldn’t smoke.
No one realized “Hey, you stopped smoking and going to doctors at a time when people believe smoking was good for you and medical science had a high death rate because they still believed in giving pregnant mothers whisky laced with heroin to balance their humors! This is actually saving your life”
Later in life the woman realized it was all bullshit, but her income and fame were based around it so she kept making loopholes in the holy books to say “Oh no it’s okay if I go to the doctor, because… shut up that’s why.”, and would claim that her illnesses late in life were caused by her enemies practicing “Animal Magnetism” on her, and were “So numerous in number that her power alone could not fight them.”
So she had a bunch of people live with her to combat the Animal Magnetism, including live-in chefs who’d make two of her meals… One to present her with for her to say “Oh it’s full of the Mesmer Poison, get rid of it!”, and a second for the chef to say “Look, I cured the poison, see how much fresher it is?”
Idk Val Kilmer is always smoking like a chimney in all his early movies. But then he also went against the church to get chemo so…
I hear he’s mute now
So they say. Guess he lost his vocal cords during the process. Wonder how it would have been if the church just let him get medical help…or never told him to start smoking in the first place ;)
They were more likely trying to tell him to STOP smoking
Yeah, it was a joke. Thus the ;)
