joanna wrote:
>
> Interesting you mention leeches. They are synonymous with medical
> quackery in most everyone's minds, but the New Yorker ran a terrific
> little article last year about how medical science is discovering that
> it has absolutely nothing to beat the ability of leeches to
> clean/cauterize and help heal wounds of a certain type.
Two points about this.
1. The use leeches were put to (bleeding) was not exactly quackery but merely a bad guess by pre-scientific medicine grounded on false premises. So that is not really relevant to the present discussion.
2. The use reported on in the New Yorker is in fact a minor achievement of modern medicine. (I believe maggots have also been used, are being used, for a similar purpose.)
---
Re earlier points. Quinine was a discovery of pre-modern medicine. Modern medicine has incorporated that along with much else from earlier medicine. The smallpox vaccine was another discovery of pre-modern medicine, improved by modern medicine. Aspirin to begin with was a patent medicine. Modern medicine has discovered that it is of use in preventing stroke. I used it for a couple years but the TIAs kept coming, and I switched to Plavix. No TIAs since. For awhile my neurologist was having me use _both_ aspirin and plavix, then some research came out to the effect that the combination was of no benefit and perhaps did harm. Normal progress of science. There are of course without a doubt a large number of errors being made in current medicine. Some will be corrected, some may still be causing trouble 50 years from now without being identified. That's how knowledge procedes.
For me personally _the_ great triumph of modern medicine was the hip replacement available in 1990. A few years earlier and the replacement available would have probably lasted less than 10 years. My surgeon told be that there was no track record on the new one at that time but the hope was 15 years or so. It will be 17 next January for mine. My damage was enough that I would have been crippled for life, probably too badly to continue teaching, had the hip replacement not been developed. Back in the '30s and '40s and '50s a broken hip was for many people a death sentence. Evidence that voting is a bad habit: Back in 1954 an older relative of my wife went out to vote (in Minneapolis), slipped on ice, broke her hip. Died about 3 months later.
Carrol