[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.