I guess I understand. You are right that they are marketed with pseudoscience. There is also some evidence that excess antioxidants may be harmful. I think though that it is the other way around from what the OP wants though. It seems that antioxidants were good science, but have been turned over to pseudoscience even though there is still some evidence for benefit.
Convulsive therapy as a psychiatric treatment? Early convulsive therapy (ca. 1500s to late 1700s) involved use of camphor to induce seizures in psychiatric patients, who were subjected to punitive conditions (e.g., lack of informed consent and lack of anesthesia). The scientific basis for inducing seizures was questionable, although some patients did “improve” after treatment. cite.
Today, convulsions are induced in a different way (ECT versus drugs), anesthesia is used, and ECT is reserved for cases in which other treatments have failed, in large part because it’s recognized that ECT can cause significant memory loss.
Freudian theory has always been just that, theory. It’s never been classed as science.
One possible example is hypnosis. When Mesmer first popularized his techniques, he explained them with claptrap about magnetic fields in the bloodstream. Following Braid’s work some years later, hypnosis has become a (more or less) legitimate field of scientific inquiry.
I’d say hypnotism, which was about magical magnetic forces and stuff, and now is used in dentistry. Biofeedback as well.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s the correct answer to the question that he asked. The problem is that the OP believed himself to be asking something different and gave examples and asked for examples that didn’t actually fit what he had asked for.
The practice of bleeding in the Middle Ages was based on a totally unscientific basis (balancing humors). But there’s some current research that suggests high levels of iron in the blood might be beneficial to certain bacterial infections, including the plague.
There are a few cases where creationist claims have been accepted in a modified form, especially when it came to challenging the rigorous uniformitarianism that was popular in the 1800’s which assumed that everything was always the result of a slow and gradual process.
The Montana/Idaho/Wyoming badlands show evidence of erosion by water. The original scientific viewpoint was that it must have been a gradual erosion over time. The creationists saw it as proof of a one-time catastrophe - Noah’s flood. The current scientific consensus is that it was a series of massive floods due to breaks in glaciers, rather than a gradual process.
Darwinists tended to describe evolution as a gradual, even process. Creationists obviously don’t believe it at all, and insisted on stable species. The current theory of punctuated equilibrium has long periods of relative genetic stability intermixed with shorter periods of relatively rapid speciation.
Bleeding would lead to low levels of iron in the blood, not high. Bloodletting is the most effective therapy for hemochromatosis, a condition caused by high levels of iron in the blood, but they call it “theraputic phlebotomy” to avoid mental images of medieval barbers.
Still, it’s a bit of a stretch to consider than a valid example for this thread.
Pseudoscience is any science that hasn’t been mainstreamed, and it goes as far back as science itself. For example the Greek’s debates on the particle, remember some people rejected the idea of the atom? And how about Galileo Galilei and the grand idea that Earth goes around the sun? Modern examples could include handwriting analysis, which Cecil covers here.
Emphatically not being smart-ass here, but: define “theory” (Like myth, it’s a case where popular use and technical use are close to antonyms.)
Mesmerism vs. modern hypnosedation and hypnotherapy? Good example, IMO.
Well, I guess I wasn’t clear in the post… when I said “beneficial for the infection,” I meant “good for the bacteria, bad for the person.” High levels of iron promote the bacterial growth. So bleeding would lower levels of iron and make the infection progress more slowly.
It is still bunk.
But Catastrophism was never really pseudoscience (despite being co-opted by creationsm). There was a genuine scientific debate between Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism, with both sides looking for data and measurements to test their theory. Of course scientists being humans the debate turned into a “us or them” situation between rival camps, the reality on the other hand was more nuanced.
Thats not the same as something genuinely kooky and out of the mainstream being found true. In recent scientific history there is nothing that really meets that criteria other than continental drift.
As Polycarp asked, please define “theory”. I think you’re not using the scientific meaning of the word “theory”. Basically, a theory is an accepted explanation of how something works. For example, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is also “just” a theory.
THank you all. I have been away from the computer all day. It was a poorly-worded OP because I was not thinking the definitions through clearly. Thank you all.
I don’t know if this is just a case of mixed up geography (Idaho badlands?), but most erosional landscapes are still ascribed to more gradualistic processes. There are only a few areas where jökulhlaups (glacial outburst floods) have had any great affect on the landscape, most notably on the channeled scablands of eastern Washington. Catastrophic erosional features are still definitely the exception, not the rule.
Pseudoscience isn’t just things that scientists don’t accept as true. It refers to things that are believed for nonscientific reasons.
So the belief that the earth orbits around the sun was never pseudoscience that became accepted as mainstream belief, because at the time there was no such thing as science as we understand it today.
I think this definition from wikipedia is pretty apt:
If we take a definitional approach we could argue that pseudoscience can never be accepted as true science, because in order to become scientific it would have to be accepted through scientific methods, and therefore couldn’t be pseudoscience.
This is a bit unsatisfying. But there are plenty of prescientific beliefs about the world that turn out to be perfectly true, despite being believed for nonscientific reasons. I don’t think we can call these pseudoscience though.
It seems to me that pseudoscience is distinguished from other incorrect beliefs because it incorrectly appeals to scientific authority that it is not entitled to. A theory that becomes disproved isn’t pseudoscientific just because it’s wrong, it’s only pseudoscientific if there was no good reason to believe it in the first place.
To take the continental drift issue as an example, were the land bridges postulated by biogeographers pseudoscientific, or just wrong? Or how about the existance of Lemuria? Lemuria - Wikipedia.
The thing is, the sunken continent of Lemuria was theorized because it was undeniably true that the fossils of Madagascar and India were similar. Yet Madagascar was over here, while India was way over there. So there had to be some mechanism to connect the two. And it turns out that we now know there was such a mechanism, and Madagascar and India really were part of the same land mass at one time. But there was no vast sunken continent that connected them, rather the land masses moved apart.
And if land bridges are pseudoscience, well, we know that some land bridges really did and do exist–Britain was connected to Europe at one time, Alaska was connected to Siberia, many islands in Indonesia were connected to Southeast Asia, North America at one time was not connected to South America, Africa has been connected to Europe at the Straits of Gibraltar in past, and so on.
So just because the theory of Lemuria was wrong, that doesn’t mean it was pseudoscientific. It was supported by evidence, it just turned out that the evidence is better explained by a different, superior theory.
Very good. I think you pretty much summed it up well. Sorry for my misinformation. The labels of what makes science and what is just general belief or pure hogwash, or just not being accepted in it’s time, can be blurry, I guess. Thanks.
I think of pseudodsciences as being religious beliefs dressed in scientific clothing: they are ideas held by faith and belief that use the vocabulary of contemporary science. But if you dig into them, you find that they are never comfortable with the basic scientific method of ‘observe, theorize, test, record results, alter theory to fit results’. Instead, they pick results to fit pre-existing theories, or appeal to authority instead of experiment when questions are raised.
For beginners, pseudosciences are difficult to distinguish froim real science, because, real science is taught to beginners through appeal to authority as well. Experiments can be provided to demonstrate the very basics, as happens in public school and high school, but beyond that, there’s a vast area of science which requires a specialized knowledge to comprehend (which must be learned from the local authorities), or cannot be tested without large resources, or both.
So the average layperson must rely on some sort of authority. And to a layperson who does not understand how a TV set works, for example, an authority who uses big words to explain the TV set is no more plausible than one who uses big words to explain chiropractics or homeopathics. As long as the person believes the TV set or the chiropractic or the homeopathic works, they will appear precisely as authoritative.
And since comprehenibility in not required for something to be scientifically rigorous, just verifiability, scientific theories can be at least as strange as religious beliefs. (General relativity, anyone? Many-Worlds hypothesis?) And individual scientific theories can be appropriated as religious tenets and then expanded on (all the New Age beliefs about ‘enegy’ and ‘vibrations’, for example).
I have a theory that religious beliefs are born speaking the language of the science of their time: they start off almost indistinguishable from the unprovable hypotheses of their time. But they tend to ossify and become static matters of faith, while their sibling sciences change out from under them. Look at the evolution of astrology versus astronomy, for example.