[screwedup]

There's a lot of emphasis in this article on how that era's ideas of what constituted science and medicine blinded them from the truth and cost them lives.

What analogous contemporary ideas will people be laughing about in the 22nd century? What parts of how we view science and medicine are costing lives?

[koralatov]

The thing that springs immediately to my mind for me is the anti-vaccination movement. I really do think it'll be looked back on in a century as a monumentally stupid backlash based on poor 'science' and scaremongering.

I think a lot of what is taken as gospel in the field of nutrition will probably be looked back on as barmy or the result of ignorance. The low-fat thing already seems to be going that way.

[the_af]

I thought the anti-vaccination movement was already considered a monumentally stupid idea...

[Jack000]

It would be more analogous to the story if through a sheer number of improbabilities the antivaxxers are vindicated in the 22nd century.

[fragmede]

Actually, the anti-vaccination movement has great relevance here. Much like Takaki's effective treatment was lampooned because of it's similarity to archaic traditional medicine and surely got wrapped up in politics of the time, the anti-vaccination movement has similarly become wrapped up by politics and can no longer sanely be discussed.

Takaki most likely had to contend with thinking his cure for beriberi was similarly "monumentally stupid" and "based on poor 'science' and scaremongering", which prevented an objective examination of his experiments.

[fragmede]

There was a study done on survival rates of acute heart patients, and the effectiveness of cardiologists. The data showed that when cardiologists were away at conferences, mortality rates went down 7 percent or so.

Yet the American Heart Association treated this study as a curiosity, and doctors deemed it only worthy of snide comments about using it to justifying conference trips to hospital administrators.

http://freakonomics.com/2015/04/09/how-many-doctors-does-it-...

As for science, the two examples I'll trot out yet again are Pluto, and kibibytes. Pluto, is of course, not a planet, yet many cling to the nomenclature simply because that's what they learned growing up. More relevant for HN's is usage of kibibytes for 1024 bytes and kilobytes for 1000 bytes. Uptake on replacing the more traditional usage is similarly slow, for some reason.

[ceejayoz]

> There was a study done on survival rates of acute heart patients, and the effectiveness of cardiologists. The data showed that when cardiologists were away at conferences, mortality rates went down 7 percent or so.

The ramifications of that aren't clear, though, as it could be something so simple as the risky/difficult procedures being delayed when the best docs are out of the hospital.

[nitrogen]

The difference with kibibytes is that they weren't discovered scientifically, someone (or some group) just decided to force SI prefix normalization on inherently binary units. Most people I know don't use power of two units anyway, though, so those two factors alone would definitely slow uptake.

Pluto is sort of the same, though at least there's an empirical justification in that there are other similarly sized bodies that shouldn't qualify as planets, so a consistent definition was chosen to exclude them and Pluto. But because it's a definitional change rather than a new discovery, people can be slow to adopt it.

[pdkl95]

I believe the point of this (and the highly-recommended article linked above about Scott/Vitamin C/scurvy), is that those involved are, as you say, blind to important truths. By definition, we cannot know which of our contemporary conclusions will be seen by future scientists as backwards or dangerously misleading.

In my opinion, the unsolvable nature of this kind of problem is a lesson in the importance of humility. After a lot of hard work and rigorous investigation, it is easy to conclude that some conclusion must be correct. Unfortunately, as science can only works within the range of known observations. New evidence can completely undermine supposedly "certain" conclusions. Much to the annoyance of the people reporting on scientific discoveries, or the people that demand certainty in any report so they can rely on it (e.g. for military purposes), there is no "final" conclusion in science.

[mark-r]

I think it will be our ignorance of the harm caused by the new chemicals we've invented or put into widespread use over the last 50 years.

[Symmetry]

Over-use of p-values without understanding them? https://xkcd.com/882/

[mturmon]

A good question.

I assumed the OP was submitted as a parallel to the (possible) connection of some mental illnesses to inflammation and infection, just seen on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9388176

Both feature doctors noticing weird chains of causation that accidentally cure mysterious ailments.

[Natsu]

Personally, I suspect that psychology will get overhauled. It already has been to a significant degree, actually.