Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
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.
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.
Gah, I was going to say plate tectonics.
Heliocentricism is a good one, the story they teach in school was that "The Pope just didn't look through Galileo's Telescope because he believed in Jesus too much!"
In reality other practioneers of the sciences simply couldn't recreate Galileo's work and thought it wasn't worth entertaining, especially since it wasn't just an idea with evidence against it at the time, but one that was politically messy thanks to the Protestant Reformation...
I really hate it when people oversimplify history, especially to paint any organization in a harsher light than it deserves. (That and if we could get more of certain crowds to realize science is more complicated than just saying "Church bad" that would help a lot...)
So the answer is "most things".
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 was that 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).
Plate techtonics weren't scientific consensus until 1968-1975 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0040195177901974?via%3Dihub
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.
The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.
But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:
- Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
- Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.
It wasn't due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.
This is the first I'm hearing of antisemitism being at all related. Where did this come from?
OP is inadvertantly providing another example: the phrase "conspiracy theory". It was coined by the US government as a way to discredit ideas - to make people look like crackpots. Lots of negative propaganda was created around that phrase.
Fast forward to today and "conspiracy theory", though admittedly still tainted in various ways, has made a resurgence. Things that would have gotten you laughed out of the room are now proven fact(like Iran-Contra, for a simple and fairly uncontroversial example).
Dude. Just take a stroll along X (Twitter) or YouTube comments.
Sooooooo many bots linked to profiles with Ai generated images talking to each other. It's wild.
the dead internet can easily be solved so not sure it's that prophetic. various easy ways to verify humans exist while keeping anonymity if you wish. these same mechanisms can be used for voting.
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.
There are unfortunately still a lot of medical practitioners out there who either don't believe in it or know nothing about it. I don't like disclosing my diagnosis with new doctors because you just don't know how they will respond.
Another interesting tidbit, by the way, is that studies have found that people who are more active and athletic are more likely to develop ME. That was the case for me. It's really rough going from being an active, semi-athletic person to being barely able to function.
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!
Bacteria being the cause of ulcers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori
Quantum Mechanics: The early concepts of quantum mechanics, such as quantized energy levels and wave-particle duality, were initially met with resistance, even by scientists like Albert Einstein, who helped develop them.
Reason for Rejection: The ideas were counterintuitive and challenged classical physics' deterministic view, introducing probabilistic interpretations of nature.
Adoption: The overwhelming experimental evidence, such as the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, and the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, eventually led to the acceptance of quantum mechanics as a fundamental framework in physics.
Schrödinger's cat was also meant as a rejection of quantum mechanics. Something cannot be both a wave and a partical until observed the same way a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed. However, it does seem like quantum superposition is a reality, making the thought experiment even more bizarre.
To make it clear how bizarre, The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb test has actually been experimented, and proven both do simultaneously exist and interact with each other. To expand the Schrödinger's cat joke, quantum physics allows that you may find a half-eaten dead cat in the box.
Schrödinger was not "rejecting" quantum mechanics, he was rejecting people treating things described in a superposition of states as literally existing in "two places at once." And Schrödinger's argument still holds up perfectly. What you are doing is equating a very dubious philosophical take on quantum mechanics with quantum mechanics itself, as if anyone who does not adhere to this dubious philosophical take is "denying quantum mechanics." But this was not what Schrödinger was doing at all.
What you say here is a popular opinion, but it just doesn't make any sense if you apply any scrutiny to it, which is what Schrödinger was trying to show. Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory where probability amplitudes are complex-valued, so things can have a -100% chance of occurring, or even a 100i% chance of occurring. This gives rise to interference effects which are unique to quantum mechanics. You interpret what these probabilities mean in physical reality based on how far they are away from zero (the further from zero, the more probable), but the negative signs allow for things to cancel out in ways that would not occur in normal probability theory, known as interference effects. Interference effects are the hallmark of quantum mechanics.
Because quantum probabilities have this difference, some people have wondered if maybe they are not probabilities at all but describe some sort of physical entity. If you believe this, then when you describe a particle as having a 50% probability of being here and a 50% probability of being there, then this is not just a statistical prediction but there must be some sort of "smeared out" entity that is both here and there simultaneously. Schrödinger showed that believing this leads to nonsense as you could trivially set up a chain reaction that scales up the effect of a single particle in a superposition of states to eventually affect a big system, forcing you to describe the big system, like a cat, in a superposition of states. If you believe particles really are "smeared out" here and there simultaneously, then you have to believe cats can be both "smeared out" here and there simultaneously.
Ironically, it was Schrödinger himself that spawned this way of thinking. Quantum mechanics was originally formulated without superposition in what is known as matrix mechanics. Matrix mechanics is complete, meaning, it fully makes all the same predictions as traditional quantum mechanics. It is a mathematically equivalent theory. Yet, what is different about it is that it does not include any sort of continuous evolution of a quantum state. It only describes discrete observables and how they change when they undergo discrete interactions.
Schrödinger did not like this on philosophical grounds due to the lack of continuity. There were discrete "gaps" between interactions. He criticized it saying that "I do not believe that the electron hops about like a flea" and came up with his famous wave equation as a replacement. This wave equation describes a list of probability amplitudes evolving like a wave in between interactions, and makes the same predictions as matrix mechanics. People then use the wave equation to argue that the particle literally becomes smeared out like a wave in between interactions.
However, Schrödinger later abandoned this point of view because it leads to nonsense. He pointed in one of his books that while his wave equation gets rid of the gaps in between interactions, it introduces a new gap in between the wave and the particle, as the moment you measure the wave it "jumps" into being a particle randomly, which is sometimes called the "collapse of the wave function." This made even less sense because suddenly there is a special role for measurement. Take the cat example. Why doesn't the cat's observation of this wave not cause it to "collapse" but the person's observation does? There is no special role for "measurement" in quantum mechanics, so it is unclear how to even answer this in the framework of quantum mechanics.
Schrödinger was thus arguing to go back to the position of treating quantum mechanics as a theory of discrete interactions. There are just "gaps" between interactions we cannot fill. The probability distribution does not represent a literal physical entity, it is just a predictive tool, a list of probabilities assigned to predict the outcome of an experiment. If we say a particle has a 50% chance of being here or a 50% chance of being there, it is just a prediction of where it will be if we were to measure it and shouldn't be interpreted as the particle being literally smeared out between here and there at the same time.
There is no reason you have to actually believe particles can be smeared out between here and there at the same time. This is a philosophical interpretation which, if you believe it, it has an enormous amount of problems with it, such as what Schrödinger pointed out which ultimately gets to the heart of the measurement problem, but there are even larger problems. Wigner had also pointed out a paradox whereby two observers would assign different probability distributions to the same system. If it is merely probabilities, this isn't a problem. If I flip a coin and look at the outcome and it's heads, I would say it has a 100% chance of being heads because I saw it as heads, but if I asked you and covered it up so you did not see it, you would assign a 50% probability of it being heads or tails. If you believe the wave function represents a physical entity, then you could setup something similar in quantum mechanics whereby two different observers would describe two different waves, and so the physical shape of the wave would have to differ based on the observer.
There are a lot more problems as well. A probability distribution scales up in terms of its dimensions exponentially. With a single bit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. With two bits, there's four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. With three bits, eight outcomes. With four bits, sixteen outcomes. If we assign a probability amplitude to each possible outcome, then the number of degrees of freedom grows exponentially the more bits we have under consideration.
This is also true in quantum mechanics for the wave function, since it is again basically a list of probability amplitudes. If we treat the wave function as representing a physical wave, then this wave would not exist in our four-dimensional spacetime, but instead in an infinitely dimensional space known as a Hilbert space. If you want to believe the universe actually physically made up of infinitely dimensional waves, have at ya. But personally, I find it much easier to just treat a probability distribution as, well, a probability distribution.
For us today it may be surprising, but in 1922, Einstein was not awarded for the Relativity theories (SRT 1905, ART 1915) with the Physics Nobel prise 1921, but for his theory on the explanation of the photoelectric effect (1905), as the theory of relativity was still controversially discussed.
I remember they actually wrote a book "debunking him" called "100 Authors Against Einstein"
To which, like a total gigachad, he responded. "If I were really wrong, it would have only taken one."
Our professor in quantum chemistry always told the story, that no one believed in it in the beginning and wanted to disprove it. This lead to one of the best tested hypotheses in the field that it is today.
Quantum mechanics works, no doubt about it. What I seriously doubt is the interpretation of what it means. When you get right down to it, it's just our best most successful attempt to model physical systems we can't observe with enough detail to tell exactly what's happening. The whole uncertainty principle isn't some magic truth about the nature of reality, it's just a statement about measuring particles by bumping them with other particles. Wave particle duality is an interpretation of the math, it isn't required for the math to work. Bell "disproved" hidden variable theories and we've been working with our hands tied behind our backs ever since, just so we can preserve the comforting fiction that have free will or that it means anything in the first place. It honestly pisses me off because so many scientists just accept the Copenhagen interpretation as truth, to the point that it's become dogma and anyone suggesting otherwise is automatically wrong. It's no wonder particle physics has hardly made any progress in the last few decades.
Everything we do is just trying to model reality. It has always been like that, reality is not simple.
What do you mean with"hands tied behind our backs"?
It is weird that you start by criticizing our physical theories being descriptions of reality then end criticizing the Copenhagen interpretation, since this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that physics is not about describing nature but describing what we can say about nature. It doesn't make claims about underlying ontological reality but specifically says we cannot make those claims from physics and thus treats the maths in a more utilitarian fashion.
The only interpretation of quantum mechanics that actually tries to interpret it at face value as a theory of the natural world is relational quantum mechanics which isn't that popular as most people dislike the notion of reality being relative all the way down. Almost all philosophers in academia define objective reality in terms of something being absolute and point-of-view independent, and so most academics struggle to comprehend what it even means to say that reality is relative all the way down, and thus interpreting quantum mechanics as a theory of nature at face-value is actually very unpopular.
All other interpretations either: (1) treat quantum mechanics as incomplete and therefore something needs to be added to it in order to complete it, such as hidden variables in the case of pilot wave theory or superdeterminism, or a universal psi with some underlying mathematics from which to derive the Born rule in the Many Worlds Interpretation, or (2) avoid saying anything about physical reality at all, such as Copenhagen or QBism.
Since you talk about "free will," I suppose you are talking about superdeterminism? Superdeterminism works by pointing out that at the Big Bang, everything was localized to a single place, and thus locally causally connected, so all apparent nonlocality could be explained if the correlations between things were all established at the Big Bang. The problem with this point of view, however, is that it only works if you know the initial configuration of all particles in the universe and a supercomputer powerful to trace them out to modern day.
Without it, you cannot actually predict any of these correlations ahead of time. You have to just assume that the particles "know" how to correlate to one another at a distance even though you cannot account for how this happens. Mathematically, this would be the same as a nonlocal hidden variable theory. While you might have a nice underlying philosophical story to go along with it as to how it isn't truly nonlocal, the maths would still run into contradictions with special relativity. You would find it difficult to construe the maths in such a way that the hidden variables would be Lorentz invariant.
Superdeterministic models thus struggle to ever get off the ground. They only all exist as toy models. None of them can reproduce all the predictions of quantum field theory, which requires more than just accounting for quantum mechanics, but doing so in a way that is also compatible with special relativity.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of a reverse Uno on your question, but I thought it was interesting while Nazism came to prominence, some scientists were like hey I'm just as racist and anti-semitic as you, but this race stuff you're doing isn't very scientific. They were dismissed as quacks. Later after doing horrible experiments, nazi scientists were frustrated that their findings weren't adding up to their ideology.
See also: Jesse Owens.
From what I understand, there's this myth that Nazi Scientists were pardoned because they revolutionized science with experiments too horrible for anyone else to perform, but the data we learned from this was just THAT amazing. (TERFs like to make their own spin on this by saying the genital reconstruction used in gender affirming surgeries today was made by the Nazis)
in reality, no they were just massive racists and America only joined the Allies instead of the Axis Powers because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, had that not happen we may have joined up with Hitler. So, eh, just grab a few of the doctors with operation paperclip, put em to work getting us to the moon....
From what I understand all Mengele really learned was that if you kill children, they die.
Which I'm not a historian, but I think we already assumed as much....
Yeah, used to think that of the nazi scientists, but that was done for Japanese scientists because as awful as they were they actually provided useful data. The nazi scientists stuff was pretty much useless because it was all in furthering their dumb race shit.
I think most of the german scientists the USA took were in fields like rocketry and physics.
The U.S. supplied more than $600 billion (in 2023 dollars) in lend-lease aid, mostly to Britain and the USSR, starting in March 1941. It's ludicrous to say that they were ever considering joining the Axis powers.
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
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....
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?"
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.
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 hate to be so selfish, but as someone with ME, the research that has accompanied Long Covid has been a real blessing. Prior to Long Covid, so little was being done and few people took ME/CFS seriously.
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.
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.
People had similar responses to the ideas of negative numbers and irrational numbers when they were identified. There's a story that a follower of Pythagoras was drown for identifying irrational numbers. I suspect it's not true, but certainly it seems people had a hard time grasping the concept.
Funny how this happened with negative numbers (subtraction) and irrational numbers (logs and roots), but no one was bothered by fractions (division).
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.
Wearing masks to not catch diseases when treating patients.
Many scientific hypotheses started out as what seemed like crazy ideas at the time. When Galileo and Newton challenged the ideas of Aristotle, this was seen as fringe and radical. When Einstein challenged the accepted Newtonian dogma it was seen as scientific heresy at first. These ideas only seem mainstream to us with hindsight.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Planck's Principal
A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.
So, not really accurate. Throw it on the pile with horseshoe theory.
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.
I think an interesting one (that is still controversial) is that megakaryocytes(MKs) in the lung actually produce a significant amount of the platelets in your body. Rather than platelets all coming from bone marrow MKs. It is interesting because these two different platelet origins have different responses to infection.
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.
The idea that rocks sometimes fall from the sky.
Epigenetics vindicates a small portion of the theory behind Lamarckism, though there’s still a lot of research to be done to understand the actual mechanisms underlying it
Lamarckism is the idea that a parent passes traits to its offsprings based on use or disuse of the trait. There is no support for this in genetics or epigenitics. Epigenitics deals with stably heritable traits based on by a mechanism other than DNA. It doesn't pertain to whether a trait is used or disused.
"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.
I'll go with... Probably not a good idea to ingest radium.
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.
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."
There are a lot of things that "Western" medicine took from other cultures and then turn around and brand them pseudoscience barbarians for the remainder that didn't work. Like a lot of modern concepts of psychology from India. Medicines from indigenous Americans . Etc.
Also worth noting that the remaining knowledge base was deemed "pseudoscience" by the scientific community of yesteryear and a lot has changed. I'm not promoting unproven potentially dangerous alternative medicines. But I am saying it's worth re reviewing them from time to time. The Mayans had a very modern understanding of astronomy, for example.
That India link is silly, especially with your angle. They're trying to say "believe our woo", not "you stole our woo". Every culture everywhere has come up with tons of bullshit, and the real work is proving what's true and what isn't. "Interpretations of the famous vedas" is of zero use to science, sorry.
I remember when James Randi "debunked" meditation.
Yeah that's aged well...
While it hasn't been proven scientifically yet, I believe that it will be in the future: the idea that in order for humans to be healthy, we should be eating mostly fatty meat instead of grains, vegetables, and fruit.
If you're interested in learning more, you can check out the talks from:
- Dr. Ken Berry
- Dr. Anthony Chaffee
- Dr. Shawn Baker
- Dr. Paul Mason
- Dr. Tony Hampton
- Dr. Eric Westman
- Dr. Chris Palmer
- Dr. Georgia Ede
Thanks for providing a list of quacks to look out for.
You're basically describing a ketogenic diet. I started keto two months ago and it has seriously changed my life. I've lost tons of weight, my hair is noticably thicker, my mind is clear, I have tons of energy, I'm packing on strength and muscle mass, and my blood tests are not only normal but great for the first time in almost a decade. I have a chronic, incurable, largely untreatable illness that also seems to be gradually going into remission. I might be functional again someday,
I worked as a scientist for years so I'm one of the most skeptical bastards around but your assertion may have some merit. Granted, I get most of my calories from nuts and seeds, supplemented with meat, but I suspect what you're saying is a different means to the same end.
There’s a recent one I heard on radiolab podcast. In Chinese medicine there’s this concept of Chi that ebbs and flows throughout all of our body and our organs.
Western science dismissed it for a long time, but we were dumbfounded when a cancer would start somewhere, say the liver and then suddenly start appearing elsewhere like the brain, without harming anything in between.
Well, it turns out, our cell drying process for preparing slides for examination was crushing this tiny little matrix of tubes… that connects everything together. It’s working its way through the scientific process to be considered a new organ.
I was curious to learn more about this, because it sounded interesting, so I googled it. I'm guessing you're talking about the interstitium? There's a lot of criticism of that episode for inaccuracies about the interstitium (known for much longer than the 5 years the episode claims - it's been mainstream since at least the 80s), traditional Chinese medicine (the treatments they mention have been proven to be no more effective than a placebo) and the connection between the two (there's no relation between the interstitium and the lines predicted by chi). Everyone in the discussions I found sounded pretty disappointed in the episode.
Even if it's usually pretty accurate (I don't actually know whether it is), radiolab is not the same thing as the scientific establishment, and this is probably why the OP asked if anyone who does science for a living rather than reading pop science articles could reply.
A real shame, I personally do believe in a force that we can't yet detect that's somehow important for life and conciousness....
I hope one day we find it, till then, I won't lie to anyone. This belief of mine is purely based on conjecture, gut instinct, and experiments I've done using good intentions and duct tape (which is to say, none at all)
Edit: Dear downvoters, I'm not saying for a fact this exists, that science points to it, or anything like that. I'm not trying to spread bullshit.