There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
You’ve led me to quite a Christian Scientist rabbit hole, but I cannot for the life of me find the requirement to start smoking. Rereading, is that maybe a typo that should’ve said they required people to stop smoking? I can’t find that either, but it seems to make more sense to me.
You can’t stop smoking until you start smoking…
Same. All it made me think of was that show The Leftovers (I think??) where you just see clumps of people staring at other characters while dressed all in white and chain-smoking.
Yeah it was a typo…
The movement claimed that God made man in his image, therefore man was divine and had been tricked by the illusion that is the material world into creating his own problems and illnesses.
So church members in order to correct this error and cure these mental diseases were required to abstain from substances (anything besides food and beverage basically), as taking them meant you were “reinforcing the delusion that the material world was real.”
This meant people couldn’t take vitamins, caffine, alcohol, medicine (morphine was the exception because morphine was used when the founder originally “discovered the Christian Science power”), and they couldn’t smoke.
No one realized “Hey, you stopped smoking and going to doctors at a time when people believe smoking was good for you and medical science had a high death rate because they still believed in giving pregnant mothers whisky laced with heroin to balance their humors! This is actually saving your life”
Later in life the woman realized it was all bullshit, but her income and fame were based around it so she kept making loopholes in the holy books to say “Oh no it’s okay if I go to the doctor, because… shut up that’s why.”, and would claim that her illnesses late in life were caused by her enemies practicing “Animal Magnetism” on her, and were “So numerous in number that her power alone could not fight them.”
So she had a bunch of people live with her to combat the Animal Magnetism, including live-in chefs who’d make two of her meals… One to present her with for her to say “Oh it’s full of the Mesmer Poison, get rid of it!”, and a second for the chef to say “Look, I cured the poison, see how much fresher it is?”
It absolutely was a typo, everyone thought smoking was good for you, but this crazy lady said “Jesus said we shouldn’t smoke if we wanna awaken our God powers!”
And… people believed her because when they stopped smoking they stopped dying.
Funnily enough, the woman in question used to practice Homeopathy and when coming up with her Christian Science ideas she sought to prove it by replacing the homeopathy meds of someone in her care with fakes. Which of course were just as effective, proving that
_Homeopathy doesn’t workhe activated his Hamon Breathing and cured himself of Dio’s evil poisons.Thanks for clarifying and just to make sure I didn’t misrepresent myself, I was absolutely not trying to bust your chops. I could see it going either way given the time period.