More precisely, willow bark contains an aspirin-like substance, which does have some effectiveness against headaches and the like, but which is also very rough on the digestive tract. Aspirin is a chemically modified variant which has the same painkilling effects, but is easier on the side effects.
I find this particular bit of Ctrl+V auto-snark rather tedious and annoying.
But as for the story of artemisinin, it seems worth noting that (at least, according to Wikipedia), out of the nearly 5000 traditional Chinese malaria medicines which were tested, it was the only one found to be effective. (Remarkably effective, but I wouldn’t call this a win for traditional medicine; it’s a win for testing things to figure out which are effective and which aren’t.)
Quite.
The compund found in willow bark is salicylic acid which got its name from the systematic name of the genus that willow belongs to: Salix. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid: salicylic acid which has been acetylated at the ortho hydroxyl site.
Those of us who devoured Jules Verne’s books when we were young can remember how Gideon Spilett and Cyrus Smith used extract of willow bark - containing salicylic acid - to reduce Herbert’s fever in The Mysterious Island. That was my first introduction to natural products chemistry and pharmacology…
It’s up and down. There’s never been any evidence that the Qi theory has the slightest shred of validity, or that acupuncture has any effect on the vast majority of complaints. There are studies showing it can help for relaxation, but I’m not convinced that it’s the needles, as opposed to the lying down in a dark room for a while, that is the key active component in that case.
There were some studies showing effectiveness for pain and/or addiction treatment, but as far as I know more recent studies are all more mixed or negative.
So acupuncture is more like ‘was interesting for narrow applications, and can’t hurt for general relaxation, but hasn’t really panned out for anything medical’.
The talk of the bacterial causes of peptic ulcers got me thinking about active yogurt and other live culture foods. I wonder if that would be something that qualifies. Live culture food has long been advocated as a miracle cure for all sorts of what-ails-you. I’m not saying that we’ll find out that a 1/2 cup of live culture yogurt cures anything other than hunger. Rather, that as we understand more about the bacteria which live inside us and how they interact with us, affecting things such as digestion, the immune system, and even behavior, we are likely to develop bacteria based treatments for some disorders.
I was speaking to a gastroenterologist about this recently, and his comment was along the lines of, “we know the bacteria are very important, but expect treatment to be delivery of a known quantity of bacteria to a specific intestinal location by endoscope. Give it five years. Swallowing bacteria, whether through a pill or food, is incredibly haphazard and the research isn’t there yet to say if it causes the desired changes in bacterial levels. And, we don’t even know exactly what those desired changes are.”
So, the woo is magical properties attributed to live culture food, and the truth is the development of bacteria related treatments for some digestive disorders.
Fecal microbiota transplant is definitely indicated for certain cases of C. Difficile infection. We’ll see if it catches on in the woo community as a way to cure tons of other things. If so, we’ll need more donors. 
The cynic in me notes that an endoscopic delivery method is a billable medical procedure, unlike swallowing food. I do indeed expect delivery by endoscope will be preferred by those doing the billing.
Got a better way to avoid the destruction by stomach acid of the sample? Blindly putting down a J-tube has rather more complications or risks of failure than an EGD or a colonoscopy, IMHO.
Perhaps they’ll invent a workable enteric coating that won’t dissolve until it hits the jejunum to get the inoculum to where it belongs, but it’s not a trivial challenge.
Does quantum entanglement count as “woo”? Einstein himself called it (translated) “spooky action at a distance”.
DNA was first identified in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher.
Early biologists had no confirmation of which of the many chemicals in a cell was the hereditary molecule but it was assumed that it was some sort of protein. Proteins are composed of more than 20 amino acids giving rise to more possible combinations that could be used to biologically store information. That was certainly more likely than DNA, a nucleic acids which was composed of four different bases, which was assumed to be too simple to carry genetic information.
In 1928 Frederick Griffith showed that something from dead bacteria was able to transform a live bacteria. This showed that some unknown chemical carried information.
Then in 1944 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery-MacLeod-McCarty_experimentAvery, MacLeod, and McCarty demonstrated that DNA carries information capable of transforming a bacterium.
Then in 1953 Watson, Crick, and Franklin deduced the structure of DNA. The rest is history.
So, you’re saying that too many people don’t give a shit?
“Help us in our fight against C. Difficile infections. Give a shit.”
How can it miss as a public awareness campaign?
I’ve been following online articles on this. Haven’t done any real literature searches. Have read that it can be hard to get insurance to pay for the procedure at its current technological level, which usually involves introducing a filtered sample through a gastro tube.
They say that the problem is that what’s being delivered isn’t a known material. There could be any mix of bacteria in it. One article predicted that eventually specific strains of bacteria would be bred and incubated and proven strains or a proven mix of strains will become the standard treatment. No donors needed.
How much lag time are you talking about? Obviously before something has been substantiated with triple blind studies there are people who believe it is effective.
“woo” is a fairly recent term. An older one might be “Quack medicine”.
The health food movement of the 1970s contained some wooish stuff, judging from the arguments made at the time (it’s natural!). But processed foods, specifically low fiber, high sugar, high saturated and trans-fat substances, are understood to be pretty unhealthy if it makes up most of the diet.
Then again, liquid protein, whatever that is, was also sold widely in health food stores.
Multi-vitamins might reduce cancer among men. But some of breathless the vitamin claims seem unlikely to pan out. (Vitamin E may be a decent anti-oxidant, but it’s virility enhancing qualities are the stuff of humor.)
Cecil on Vit C:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/597/does-vitamin-c-prevent-colds-cancer-etc
How is it that everyone ITT seems to be familiar with this use of “woo” relating to pseudoscience, whereas the only definition I had ever heard is still the only one listed in the dictionary: “to seek the favor, affection, or love of, especially with a view to marriage”…?
It’s a relatively new use of the word, and still might be considered jargon, not universal. Things spread by Internet faster than dictionaries are updated.
That’s a myth. Actually they demo’d it in public for almost an entire year at the famous Huffman Prarie in Dayton, inviting the press. Nobody showed. Well, local reporters did show up at their first announcement, but the weather was bad and that particular flight didn’t happen. The local Dayton newspaper objected to all the obviously crazy eyewitnesses who were mailing in complaints that the paper wasn’t covering the many public flights. The Scientific American refused to send a reporter, reasoning famously that, if the flights were real, all other reporters would already be writing it up. (But what if all newspapers use the same reasoning?) In the end, the Wrights gave up on the unassailable disbelief in the USA, and took their show on the road. They became an overnight sensation in Paris, feted by royalty, and sold aircraft contracts to France and Germany, leaving the US military to play cactch-up. And finally, Langley called them “the lying brothers” to the end, and the Smithsonian had no Wright Flyer until director Langley had died (their current flyer was donated to Science Museum in London.)
Similar situation: rocket powered space-ships were seen as Woo up to the 1940s; were seen as obvious Flash-gordon sci-fi trash. Mentioning rockets in legit research was the kiss of death for funding. Von Karman at Caltech saw R Goddard’s fate, and instead started calling them “jets,” as in JPL “Jet” propulsion Laboratory (doing rocket research,) and JATO “Jet assisted take off” (using solid-fuel rockets) and Aerojet corp (manufacturing solid-fuel motors for jato.)
Except for that odd “jet” word, the snark and derision aimed at rockets is long gone today. But imagine if a foreign country attacked us using woo-woo technology: antigravity disk aircraft shooting Tesla death rays. That probably would have been equally as surprising as when Hitler in WWII rained down upon the UK those disgusting Jules-verne-flashgordon fantasy spaceships. (If rockets were legit, then wouldn’t science military embrace them? No, they were woo, so only Hitler’s lunatic-mystical science/military did so.)
It does, if you use it to justify woo (as in the case of homeopathy).
I’ve found this news article interesting:
http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/11/people-can-literally-throw-away-negative-thoughts
I follow a couple pagan/witch blogs and they were all like “Duh! It’s Magic 101!”