[chithanh]

> Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide.

Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).

Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...

[toraway]

Semmelweis died approximately 100 years before the thalidomide scandal so not sure what that is supposed to prove…

(other than being a favorite go-to of numerous quacks and charlatans who insist that modern medicine is similarly persecuting them).

[chithanh]

It proves that the medical community did not learn from Semmelweis.

Reports on Thalidomide side effects were ignored, suppressed or dismissed. Distributors sat on such reports for months while continuing to sell the drug. Overall it took several years from the first observed birth defects until the drug was banned in most countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/25/distillers-k...

Numerous other examples before and after that (including deliberate ignorance of fatigue and medical errors resulting from it) show how medicine elevates institutional interests and groupthink over people's lives.