Carrol Cox wrote:
>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.
>
Not exactly a bad guess more like if leeches are good for X, then
they're good for Y. Modern medicine does this too, for example, using
antibiotics as a cure-all. From what I remember about the New Yorker
article the modern use was also the ancient use; the older use just kind
of went overboard.
I really am NOT (and neither is ravi) arguing that one form is good and the other is invalid. We're BOTH responding to an article that dismissed "alternative" medicine and we've argued that the modern medicine also has its failures -- some of them quite spectacular.
When one ideology replaces another, the concept of what "science" is also changes and its proponents try to discredit older forms of science as quackery and totally invalid (concealing how much they are in fact carrying over from the older science). If you look at the history of science, which is older than the Renaissance, this is very clear.
Sometimes "scientists" reject perfect valid hypothesis because of their association with an older science. For example, Galileo rejected the moon's influence on tides because of all the various powers the moon had been previously assigned, many of which were bogus.
However to say that older forms of science were affected by ideology while modern science is not is, well, completely false.
One day people will look at shock therapy, hormone therapy, and the widespread use of antibiotics and conclude that we were complete idiots. That is, assuming anyone is still alive after the superbacteria get us.
Joanna
>
>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
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
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