[robbiep]

Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever?

Whilst 1956 seems to be a fairly late date to stop what would seem in the surface to be a counter intuitive practice, 80 years earlier blood letting was still in vogue

[DiscourseFan]

I don't understand though. Someone else brought up trepanation, but pre-modern humans lived in environment where they banged there head around a lot and it may have led to better outcomes for some people to get a hole in their skull so they retained it as a cultural practice. Why would a bunch of people decide, up until 1950 or so, that it was a good idea to rub snow into your feet when they were frostbitten just because it was some practice with no strong basis in reality. The alternative is doing nothing, so what would this do that would at least make people think it was working? Because it had to look like it was working, even if it really wasn't.

[JumpCrisscross]

Most of them died!

We didn’t bother recording deaths because unless you were rich it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. Who died in South Sudan today? We don’t know. We will never know.

It’s stupidly false to project modern standard into ancient cultures. Even the concept of cartography is anthropologically new.

[DiscourseFan]

Most people trepanned with pre-modern medicine in the regions quoted below did not die, "It is a well-documented procedure in Oceania and Africa well into the twentieth century, with an estimated survival of more than 90%. There is good documentation of the tools used and of the antiseptic precautions regularly taken by witch doctors." [0]

And by that logic we know that these procedures must've worked since they didn't kill all the people the were used on, hence they were passed down for generations and survived to the modern era for us to scrutinize!

Now was it just chance or did they actually have something effective to them? There are a number of modern medicines derived from traditional practices[1], not to mentioned thousands of documented medicinal herbs that are understudied and difficult to cultivate (like the Monotropa Uniflora [2] for example). But we help ourselves little by fulling ignoring the possibility of their effectiveness. In any case, its not as if any of our medical practices we employ today does not have its source in traditional medicine, its just we can critically engage with those practices and attempt to develop something out of them with evidence-based trials. But a paradigm shift in thinking about medical practice won't happen if one always makes the same assumptions about what works and what makes people healthy. Examining these traditional/folk practices can help us do so.

[0]https://www.scielo.br/j/anp/a/rsfbjBsF9RFVgMz3DwzsnkC/?lang=... [1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6273146/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora#Uses

[JumpCrisscross]

For every traditional medicine that was proven there are more that were disproven. The paradigm shift wasn’t in the 1950s but in the Age of Enlightenment. The discovery was the scientific method.

The point about trepanning wasn’t that it was deadly but that it is wrong. It doesn’t help the underlying problems. The answer to why people keep doing it is desperation and the immune system works, which means most illnesses work themselves out, including after the ineffective intervention.

[DiscourseFan]

>It doesn’t help the underlying problems

If the complication was a subdural hematoma then similar procedures are still the standard of care today, and certainly we wouldn't be drilling to people's skulls as treatment if our ancestors never did anything similar.

>The discovery was the scientific method.

The "scientific method" is for use in objective science like measuring the speed of light. Until the patient dies, medical care is subjective. Its like with this recent election, telling a bunch of people that the "economy is good" doesn't matter if they themselves don't feel that way. In just the same way, 60 or 70 years ago someone from a developed country could've come into the undeveloped world and removed cancerous tumors by using surgical procedures that left someone with permanent disabilities, but maybe their witch doctor would've used some strange treatment that looked crazy and stupid but actually triggered a global immune response that not only removed the cancer but left the patient with a better outcome since they suffered no permanent side effects from the treatment, one which would be considered "more advanced" by today's standards, but wasn't even considered by the developed world back then. That one might claim something is "objectively" fact is only possible subjectively, and the hubris of believing that your subjective stance, even when accompanied by evidence, is absolutely true, will lead you to discount almost anything that stands outside of it as "unscientific." But you yourself cannot possibly die in your own experience, even though death is the condition of possibility for true objectivity, so until you reach that moment which never comes, you are constantly grappling with this dialectical approach to the world that constantly reshapes and reformulates itself in relation to all the experiences, feelings, and memories that you have.

>The answer to why people keep doing it is desperation and the immune system works, which means most illnesses work themselves out, including after the ineffective intervention.

It's true, but as I said most medical practices today are still derived from pre-modern medicine, even if they have been improved upon. One could make the same argument for much of what we do, since measuring outcomes won't always be able to differentiate between patients who get better on their own and those who improve with the treatment, since most treatments besides pills are impossible to test in a double blind study (you don't see double-blind studies for heart surgery techniques, for instance). Doctors do a lot based on their feelings about whats up and what they think works, far more than you are probably comfortable with, simply because there is no alternative besides constant self-criticism and research. That's why case studies are so important in the medical field, since they offer a subjective approach to the objective circumstance using objective tools that are determined subjectively.

[exe34]

people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.

[DiscourseFan]

Praying to gods has a correlation with better medical outcomes, thats why they have chapels in hospitals. Same thing with visits from friends and families. Its not like everything can be solved by "advancing" technology.

[exe34]

nope, the evidence is pretty clear on prayers: they don't work.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2802370/#:~:text=We....

[wizzwizz4]

The article you've linked describes multiple medical benefits of prayer. By "they don't work", do you mean "the observed benefits are explicable without divine intervention"?

[exe34]

no I mean that they are not reproducible and don't show up in randomised controlled trials without intellectual dishonesty.

[tharkun__]

And people "manifest" and somehow don't wonder why randomly "it works" or "doesn't work".

"Must've done something wrong while manifesting this time :shrug:"

:facepalm: !!!!!1111eleven

[DiscourseFan]

Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.

[tharkun__]

Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect).

If someone uses religion (or manifesting) to go down the path of "god helps those that help themselves", all the power to them! (as long as they don't make me believe in it)

I really am talking about people like that one radio moderator I was thinking of when making the comment: was "manifesting" all day yesterday so that someone would win the x-thousand dollars in the contest on their show this morning. Was "manifesting" getting tickets for Taylor Swif as well recently. Stuff like that. Like you said, all just manifesting "lottery ticket" type stuff. Magical thinking basically. Just "sit around and manifest and it'll happen". That's the :facepalm: stuff.

[keybored]

Word games. They don’t have an “evidence base” that are up to our standards. They might have an “evidence base” in the sense that it worked for past generation and folklore now says that it should be done.

A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.

[_yb2s]

I think most (but not all) such things actually did work, and were based on real evidence, we just don’t have easy access to that evidence and context anymore. It is quite likely that modern people are just arrogantly dismissing something they don’t understand.

[Dalewyn]

Whenever we get the inkling to belittle our ancestors, we need to remember that we are nowhere as capable as they were.

Men today cannot build the Great Pyramids of Giza or invent Greek Fire, Roman Concrete, or Damascus Steel like the men of millenia past have.

Our only solace lies in the brutal fact that we invented the internet with which we can shitpost someone on the other side of the world. That is one thing our ancestors did not have and our successors will never surpass.

[rendall]

I agree with your general point that we are in no way inherently superior to our ancestors, but Roman concrete, Damacus steel, and Greek fire are inferior to what we have today to accomplish the same things.

Practical Engineering on Roman concrete. The TL;DR is that we are far more advanced. https://youtu.be/qL0BB2PRY7k?si=kqiyxOTLBQw9h4_F

We do know how to make Damascus steel: https://youtube.com/shorts/1DNWLZ8IiMQ?si=c4-Ch7C3Q_6zcYoi

This fellow says we don't know how to make the historical Greek fire but acknowledges we can make identical substances: https://youtube.com/shorts/wiHXE6lhLmo?si=OPEjW40cck5aQAsv

We could build the Great Pyramid today using modern methods in 5 years using 2000 workers and $5 billion USD vs historical 20 years and 10s of thousands of workers: https://www.livescience.com/18589-cost-build-great-pyramid-t...

[WarOnPrivacy]

Butter on burns was passed down to my mom. I let that one die off with her generation.

[aspenmayer]

You might look into it to see if there’s something special about butter versus other oils/fats that may make butter specifically good for burns, but I understand that as keeping the air off of the burn, similarly to how oxygen tents work.

[crazygringo]

I dunno, I can see logic to that.

Today we apply petroleum jelly (Vaseline, Neosporin, etc.) over skin to help it heal, but butter is basically going to do the same thing of keeping in moisture.

[aspenmayer]

I think the reasoning with topical coatings for burns is actually something to do with avoiding gases touching the burned area, which is why they use oxygen tents for people with severe burns over a large area. Petroleum jelly and other similar products block the air from touching the burn also.

[kstrauser]

Nope. It's to form a barrier to keep bacteria out, with the downside that it also traps bacteria in.

Also, oxygen's a gas.

[aspenmayer]

I find that oils such as petroleum jelly or olive oil do provide pain relief for burns. I can only speculate as to the method of action, but I’m clearly not the only one. Apparently even air movement or contact can cause pain to burns due to the exposure of the dermis, and possibly other reasons.

> Also, oxygen's a gas.

Yeah, I think it must be carbon dioxide or some other gas that is naturally occurring in the atmosphere that causes the painful sensation, otherwise they wouldn’t use specifically oxygen?

[lukan]

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

"HBOT helps wound healing by bringing oxygen-rich plasma to tissue starved for oxygen. Wound injuries damage the body's blood vessels, They release fluid that leaks into the tissues and causes swelling. This swelling deprives the damaged cells of oxygen, and tissue starts to die. HBOT reduces swelling while flooding the tissues with oxygen. The higher pressure in the chamber increases the amount of oxygen in the blood. HBOT aims to break the cycle of swelling, oxygen starvation, and tissue death.

HBOT prevents "reperfusion injury." This is the severe tissue damage that happens when the blood supply returns to the tissues after they have been deprived of oxygen. Blood flow can be interrupted by a crush injury, for instance. If this happens, a series of events inside the damaged cells leads to the release of harmful oxygen radicals. These molecules can do damage to tissues that can't be reversed. They cause the blood vessels to clamp up and stop blood flow. HBOT encourages the body's oxygen radical scavengers to seek out the problem molecules and let healing continue.

HBOT helps block the action of harmful bacteria and strengthens the body's immune system. HBOT can disable the toxins of certain bacteria. It also increases oxygen concentration in the tissues. This helps them resist infection. And the therapy improves the ability of white blood cells to find and destroy invaders.

HBOT encourages the formation of new collagen and new skin cells. It does so by encouraging new blood vessels to grow. It also stimulates cells to make certain substances, like vascular endothelial growth factor. These attract and stimulate endothelial cells needed for healing."

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...

[buescher]

I wonder if cultured butters of the past also might have had anti-microbial properties.