[soudiere]

Humor me, what did science actually get wrong in this article?

The milk transfusions were shitty solution for lack of blood during a cholera epidemic, but the articles claims are false "In the late 19th century, milk was believed to be the perfect substitute for blood"

Soothing syrup did it's job (pain), we now shy from it because of perception of risks, but no one's ever run clinical trials on small amounts of alcohol + opioids on childrens gums showing any adverse outcomes.

Chloroform is an effective treatment for asthma, and the best we had before the discovery of beta-2 receptor agonists. See this paper for details on the physiology in mice.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702405/

Cocaine (stimulant) is also likely a somewhat effective treatment for allergies. Take a look at this clinical trial which showed antihistamine + ritalin being a more effective treatment.

https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(04)00017-X/ful...

Malaria for treatment of syphilis also makes sense, it was incurable at the time, and the other options were mercury based, ineffective and had horrific side effects. Malaria was better than mercury.

Tobacco enemas can be thought of as a large nicotine delivery mechanism. Newspaper clip says it's helpful with meningitis, inflammation of the brain, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, crosses the blood brain barrier. Maybe it did something, who knows.

[javier123454321]

I don't know those exact cases, I'll grant you that. It was fairly lazy googling in my part.

However, the cases that I do know of are the food pyramid recommending the vast majority of your caloric intake to be processed carbohydrates, lobotomy as a treatment for mental illness, and the case of David Reimer, who was raised as a girl following a botched circumsicion. Then there's thing like the missaligned incentives between sales reps and doctors leading to hundreds of thousands becoming addicted to OxyContin.

We act as though doctors and scientists are above some standard, and some even believe they follow a falsifiability principle, but there are cases - childbirth being one of them - where a common sense approach that tells you not to follow recommendations might actually be the right thing. It's a fine line, but we should have open conversations about the fallibility of science. Often, and in the comment that I was responding to, the implication is: science says it so it is correct. That's simply not the case.

[soudiere]

Dude, what common sense approaches about pregnancy do you think go against the scientific recommendations?

Please take a look at the CDC data over the last century. In 1915 infant mortality was _10_ percent. Maternal mortality was around 0.8% in 1900.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm

Are you seriously claiming that these things dropping an order of magnitude has anything to do with common sense, or not listening to doctors?

[javier123454321]

Western science is extremely useful in mechanical type of interventions such as emergency c-sections. It is well known that the intervention first approach is not the ideal, and we have been in a 50 year journey away from it. The term 'cascade of interventions' is extremely descriptive of this phenomenon, and I've seen it first hand. Yes, it's getting better now since the last 50 years, yes, it's great that science can come in with extremely precise machinery, and yes there is a tendency to over rely on the machinery by people in the field. I'm not a science denier or anything, just saying that doing more natural approaches to childbirth shouldn't be as vilified as it is now, given that we do have millenia of practice with that practice.