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I view the "established culture" you mention as science too..based on certain observations. It's not that all traditional methods are inferior or superior. We c

• irixusr 11y ago
  I've just become a father and my kid has very slight jaundice, not enough to have to do anything about it. But it did get me thinking, "how was jaundice dealt with before"? Considering 10% (??) of kids have bad jaundice that's a huge evolutionary pressure to either eliminate it (by favoring kids with larger livers) or somehow deal with it. Well my wife's (who's from a third-world and (formerly) most isolated country in the world) grandma (eldest of 13) explained it to me: She's always taken newborn's and placed them by the window for an hour. That'll do it! Then I read the history of neonatal jaundice care and I was shocked to learn that light therapy for jaundice wasn't discovered until the 50s (when a doctor noticed that newborns under the care of a nurse with particular habits fared better) and widely practiced until the 70s! +1 for folksy medicine!