I often hear, from woo proponents, that the science just hasn’t caught up yet to their particular favored practice. So has the science actually caught up to anything labeled as woo, and now it’s considered valid?
Or is the label “woo” not formal enough, such that pretty much every practice has been labeled woo at one time or another?
Ignaz Semmelweis recommended that doctors wash their hands before giving gynecological exams to pregnant women. Given that the germ theory of disease was not proved at that point in time (the 1840s), and that Semmelweis couldn’t provide enough evidence to convince people that hand washing was really that necessary, that practice didn’t really catch on.
This argument, by the way, is known on RationalWiki as the Galileo gambit, for obvious reasons. I always liked Carl Sagan’s response to it: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
I recall reading that “established medical science” poo-pooed the germ theory of infection - specifically, that washing one’s hands of blood in hot water between surgeries and/or delivering babies was a superstitious practice of uneducated midwives.
Here’s the cite: a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis dramatically reduced fatal (for the mother) incidences of “childbed fever” - from as high as 35% to under 1% - by instituting the washing of hands in a chlorinated solution, based on empirical observation that midwives who washed their hands in water had a much lower incidence rate than physicians at his clinic. This was many years before Louis Pasteur saw “germs” under a microscope, so he was unable to explain the underlying mechanism involved in the practice and was committed to an insane asylum, where he died shortly after being beaten by guards(!).
Wow. Simultaneous posts about Ignaz Semmelweis. Another reason I love the Dope!
ninja’ed. rats.
*"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly.
They told marconi
Wireless was a phony.
It’s the same old cry"
etc., etc., etc.*
And another example is acupuncture. It hasn’t gained mainstream legitimacy yet, but it’s a lot more accepted than when Westerners were first exposed to it.
Definitely need new glasses. “Beaten.” Not “Eaten.” Carry on.
To be defined as “woo” I would say that there must be a lack of empirically observable phenomenon that backs the practice or claim. The doctors of the period were practicing “woo” if they ignored or failed to investigate such claims rigorously enough. It is the method that makes the “woo” not the credentials or common practices of the people who believe or disbelieve. I think in modern times any interesting folk practice of significance has already been fairly competently investigated so we are not destined for any big surprises.
The part I have trouble with is how they arrived at a chlorinated solution over just plain water for instance? Trial and error? Were the midwives already using it?
The logical choice might have been to use alcohol of some sort since I believe it has long been known to humans that you do not want to drink from a bad water supply and that beer or wine is a good substitute… even when watered down.
I’m not sure any of these cases actually address the question. The history of science and technology are full of proposals, theories and ideas, some percentage of which worked out and some which did not. The key point is that the vast majority of these theories were substantially proven, one way or another, in relatively short time. There are a few exceptions, like plate tectonics, that took exceptional amounts of time to nail down, but by and large, the basic proof of validity comes within months or a few years after the initial proposal.
I’d say that the question is only meaningful if restricted to cases where something was proposed, investigated or tested to the limits of then-current science, rejected, and some significant amount of time (10+ years) discovered to be valid or correct. Counting every case of “You can’t do that, Edison!” means pretty much counting every discovery in history.
Accepted, maybe, by people on the street. I think the question here has to be about acceptance by the scientific medicine community, and acupuncture isn’t any closer now than it was then. It’s farther, IMO, because now we have so much negative evidence against it.
Acupuncture (healing thru “qi” and meridian channels) is woo and bunkum. BUT, sticking a needle in your skin- not very deeply- does seem to work to block much more serious pain. So, the practice of acupuncture does work. The traditional Chinese medical theory behind acupuncture is woo.
This sometimes happens. Chiropractic seems to be along the same lines.
I think someone tried something, it worked- then they and others came up with “woo” theories of why it worked then extended it to things it doesn’t work on.
Acupuncture, chiropractic (for more limited uses than the wooiest practitioners claim, but still…), TENS, many herbal medicines which have since been concentrated or made synthetic in the lab (red rice yeast—>statin drugs, for example), light therapy for SAD, Feldenkrais and other Physical Therapy techniques. Electroshock therapy for mental illness was legit and then woo and now legit again.
Just off the top of my head.
Many “herbs” have interesting pharmacological properties, and every so often someone scientifically figures out what those properties are, as well as what compound in the herb is responsible, and how to get that compound into a more effective form. In such cases, it’s quite possible that some herbalist who didn’t entirely know what she was doing was already using that herb for that purpose before (in fact, that’s usually what puts the scientists onto the scent).
Leeches. They were considered old-fashioned nonsense; if anyone suggested their use back in the 60s, they’d be laughed out of medicine.
Now the use of leeches is a standard medical treatment for some conditions.
There’s another legit-woo-legit one!
Add maggots to that list.
And bloodletting, come to think of it, but only for a very few rare blood disorders. They call it Therapeutic Phlebotomy now.
And lobotomies used to be used to cure hysteria and now are used for certain cases of really, really extreme seizure disorders when everything else has been tried. And we used to use mercury to treat syphilis and now put it in thermometers.
It’s not that bloodletting or leeches or lobotomies or mercury have now been redeemed. They are using the same substance or technique in a fundamentally different way to treat a fundamentally different condition.
I think this is a distorted set of statements. The traditional use of leeches was as a form of bloodletting, which was simply one of the cure-alls in a classical healer’s small toolbox. Leeches were just another way to extract blood, generally, for an indeterminate general result.
Leeches today are used where a reattached body part, or one whose circulation has been badly compromised, need the ‘pull through’ of continuous blood draining, which leeches provide along with a natural anticoagulant. Very specific use, with a specific and understood purpose - not woo-y hokum.
I’m not sure I agree with that about bloodletting. Lots of the “excess” conditions that bloodletting used to be used to cure do, in fact, match up with the symptoms of iron overload caused by excess red blood cells (that we now use it to treat). I’d bet that it started off as an effective treatment for some few that then got expanded and used and overused where it wasn’t so useful. It’s more limited now, but I don’t see how it’s used in a “fundamentally different way”.
Maybe even the same for lobotomies, which are so old they’re older than writing. Og had demons in the head and they caused him to jerk around, so Ugg the Healer made a hole to let the demons out. Hey, it worked! Then Ig started being a pain in the ass, and a hole in her head made her pretty docile. Hmm…I guess that “worked” for a certain sense of the term… Now we limit lobotomies (chemical, or mechanical) to a more narrow range of modern diagnoses, and we don’t think we’re letting demons out, but the basic idea isn’t so far off from Ugg - a person can’t control their actions, and a hole in their head sometimes helps.
Leeches were used for more than bloodletting - they were also used to treat stumps of limbs lost to the battlefield and wounds which festered because they closed up too soon. Again, exactly for the purpose we use them now - to increase circulation and prevent clotting so an area of low blood circulation has time to heal.
Really folks, these weren’t all ignorant superstitions - they just had different vocabularies, and a more limited toolbox, so they had broader applications for the fewer tools they had. Sometimes too broad, and they were ineffective, or caused harm.
Using vitamin C as a treatment for scurvy was controversial in its time and took over a century to catch on. Some people thought any acidic beverage would work (I think some tried vinegar, etc), and if fruits were exposed to the air or heat it would damage the vitamin C which meant sometimes fruits worked and sometimes they didn’t based on how they were stored and prepared. As a result it became hard to convince people something in fresh fruit treated scurvy.
When John Snow had the water pump in London shut down in 1856 to stop a cholera epidemic, it was considered more of a pleasantry to appease him than something the powers that be took seriously. After the epidemic ended they put the handle back on the pump. Miasma theory was still the main theory and germ theory was laughable.