6 ms·

What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"? Edit: Since people are b

What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"? Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
VBprogrammer 6y ago
I guess it depends how you define alternative medicine. The bark of a willow tree, a traditional remedy, from which aspirin is derived is given as an example in the beat poem.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  The point was you don't have to define it at all. You just need some things that were previously dismissed as "alternative medicine" in the past (say) 50 years, but which are now widely seen as ordinary medicine. I'm looking for examples a lot of people might actually remember from their own lives here... if you have to go back a century to find something then that doesn't count (sorry).
  - mark-r 6y ago
    Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago isn't exactly proving anything. I would've hoped this would be obvious but apparently it was not.
      - mark-r 6y ago
        Do you really think human nature has changed that much in the last century?
        mehrdadn 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything about "human nature".
        mark-r 6y ago
        Human nature is what defines the difference between alternative and regular. It also defines what is a double standard. You didn't need to explicitly mention it for it to be relevant to the discussion.
        mehrdadn 6y ago
        Okay, I won't stop you. Go ahead and bring up examples from Hippocrates's time then. Human nature hasn't changed much on these timescales so you will be making a very strong point about modern medicine with such examples.
        mark-r 6y ago
        I haven't brought up examples that old, and neither has anyone else in this thread. Typical straw man. I just pointed out that you were being unnecessarily restrictive and that this would hinder the effort to get the examples you seek.
EliRivers 6y ago
Sanitation guided by germ theory might never have been explicitly called "alternative medicine", pre-dating common use of the term, but when Miasma Theory was dominant germ theory was just that. Does rely on accepting "cleaning things" as medicine. It's certainly a great way to prevent disease. Does it count as "alternative preventative medicine"?
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  By "alternative medicine" I'm not talking 19th century views here, especially given the comparison to AI. Can you pick something from like the past half-century or so? Which people called alternative medicine but which now they call medicine?
  - waterheater 6y ago
    The modern medical field has authorities who largely determine what is medicine and what is "alternative medicine." I can't imagine anything which today is considered "medicine" that isn't approved by the FDA; can you? AI doesn't have such an authority. New AI methods can be deployed without asking for permission from a governing body. 19th century views on medicine is actually a better comparison than something from the last fifty years, because advancements in modern medicine is largely shaped by governing authorities.
    - esperent 6y ago
      The FDA is a US body, so if you take a global perspective I'm sure you'll find lots of examples of things that are 'alternative medicine' according to the FDA but just 'medicine' according to the equivalent bodies in other countries. Someone brought up St. John's Wort as an example above, apparently now legitimate in some European countries.
zeveb 6y ago
ISTR that seaweed was a folk remedy for goiter. It contains relatively high amounts of iodine, which prevents thyroid conditions. I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Is that an example from the 15th century? Is there nothing more modern?
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    Seems to me that's the whole point? Effective treatments as been subsumed into "mainstream" medicine, perhaps with a bit of purification/standardization along the way, while the ineffective and unproven stuff remains "alternative medicine". If it somehow turns out that homeopathy is an effective therapy for something (besides dehydration), it'll end up with a procedure code, the hospital pharmacy will stock 10x tincture of whatever, and eventually it will be just another mainstream medical treatment.
mam2 6y ago
Mdma in the future
- esperent 6y ago
  We can hope. Along with various psychedelics and ketamine.
trhway 6y ago
artemisinin. Has been used for millenia to effectively treat a lot of things (naturally so because of its being super-peroxide), anecdotally/personally - the wormwood was part of the folk medicine toolbox of my Ukrainian grandmother, yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin "It was discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who was co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery.[2] " There are "scientific/medicine" results these days what it even works against cancer, for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/
the_jeremy 6y ago
These aren't "finding loopholes in the question". Most "alternative medicine" things that work aren't new information. Humans have had literal millenia to figure out how to deal with ailments. The easiest methods that people can think of to try to solve a problem have been done by someone, and were passed around when they worked. There's things like "gargle with salt water to cure a sore throat". That's commonly done remedy that was done forever and we now understand the science behind it. This page[0] labels it under an "alternative medicine" tag, as does this page[1]: [0]: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wlth-salt-water-ease-a-sore-throat#1 https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wl... [1]: https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/article/home-remedies-mom-right-about https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/artic...
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago is very much finding a loophole and missing the point of the question.
  - biddlesby 6y ago
    I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. The conclusion then is that there are things we consider medicine today that used to be alternative medicine.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      > I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. That would imply examples from 400 BC would have the same relevance as examples from 50 years ago. I assumed it was obvious that that's not the case, but it seems I was wrong.
currymj 6y ago
Artemisinin is an antimalarial drug derived from a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fevers, including malaria. First discovered and isolated in 1972. St. John's Wort started out as alternative medicine but is now officially approved and prescribed for treating depression in many European countries -- I believe this got started in the 1990s. I think this kind of thing is quite rare in medicine, though. Whereas it's not hard to find stuff that was done by AI researchers that somehow no longer counts as AI.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the examples. It got me going in a direction I didn't expect the discussion to go though: were these examples of traditional medicine or alternative medicine? They seem to be the former whereas this discussion was about the latter - alternative and traditional medicine are not the same thing [1]: > Complementary medicine refers to therapies that complement traditional western (or allopathic) medicine and is used together with conventional medicine, and alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. Alternative medicine refers to therapeutic approaches taken in place of traditional medicine and used to treat or ameliorate disease. The difference (as I've understood it anyway) is "alternative medicine" implies you contradict modern medical practices, which was the basis for the comment I replied to. And which (I guess not surprisingly) medical experts recommend against. So I think the kind of example you'd want is a medical treatment that modern medicine previously recommended against, but that ended up vouching later. Because this was all a response to a comment that suggested people had a double-standard and were moving the goalposts or something like that (hence the AI comparison). Merely showing the science went from "we don't know if X is a good idea" to "we know X is a good idea" isn't finding an inconsistency. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068720/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068720/
  - currymj 6y ago
    I can't think of any of those from recent history. Medicine has gotten pretty good. Exceptions may be in mental health. Somebody else mentioned psychedelic drugs, which might be FDA-approved for some conditions soon, but all official medical sources currently treat them as extremely dangerous. However, I do think cherry-picking the effective treatments from naturopathy and TCM and turning them into mainstream medicine is similar in spirit to cherry-picking the successful approaches from 80s and 90s AI research and turning them into "just algorithms". But there are a lot more successful old-school AI techniques than there are effective alternative medicine treatments.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The Australian doctor who proved ulcers and stomach cancer could be caused by bacterial infection was dismissed until he inoculated himself and cured it with antibiotics. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  That is incredible and terrifying. Thanks for sharing!
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I'm personally very grateful to that doctor. I used to suffer from quite painful stomach ulcers in my teens. I was scheduled for an endoscopy but the doctor I was referred to had obviously heard of this research. One week of antibiotics later and I have never suffered from it again.
alchemism 6y ago
“Holistic Nursing” is a serious effort at legitimizing what would have been considered New Age medicine 50 years ago. http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284072679/Chapter5_Sample.pdf http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284072679/Chapter5_Sample.pdf
akiselev 6y ago
I may be off on this but I believe low carb diets as a treatment for prediabetics/diabetics was considered pseudoscience for decades by most doctors [1], largely associated with fad diets like Atkins and keto. Over the last decade or two that has slowly been changing. Holistic approaches in general have been gaining steam and taking back that word from the naturopaths. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188071/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188071/
Izkata 6y ago
I have an interesting one from within the past month, although I don't think the phrase "alternative medicine" was used: Trump was mocked in the media for asking if getting UV light inside the body was a possible treatment for covid19, as if he was suggesting an alternative medicine treatment. And light therapy does have that long a history. Thing is, this is not only a known treatment used in the past (only falling out of favor in the 50s), there are studies from the past few decades about how well UV light works on viruses, and it really is being investigated today for use on SARS-CoV-2.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

VBprogrammer 6y ago

I guess it depends how you define alternative medicine. The bark of a willow tree, a traditional remedy, from which aspirin is derived is given as an example in the beat poem.

mehrdadn 6y ago
The point was you don't have to define it at all. You just need some things that were previously dismissed as "alternative medicine" in the past (say) 50 years, but which are now widely seen as ordinary medicine. I'm looking for examples a lot of people might actually remember from their own lives here... if you have to go back a century to find something then that doesn't count (sorry).
- mark-r 6y ago
  Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago isn't exactly proving anything. I would've hoped this would be obvious but apparently it was not.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      Do you really think human nature has changed that much in the last century?
      - mehrdadn 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything about "human nature".
        mark-r 6y ago
        Human nature is what defines the difference between alternative and regular. It also defines what is a double standard. You didn't need to explicitly mention it for it to be relevant to the discussion.
        mehrdadn 6y ago
        Okay, I won't stop you. Go ahead and bring up examples from Hippocrates's time then. Human nature hasn't changed much on these timescales so you will be making a very strong point about modern medicine with such examples.
        mark-r 6y ago
        I haven't brought up examples that old, and neither has anyone else in this thread. Typical straw man. I just pointed out that you were being unnecessarily restrictive and that this would hinder the effort to get the examples you seek.

EliRivers 6y ago

Sanitation guided by germ theory might never have been explicitly called "alternative medicine", pre-dating common use of the term, but when Miasma Theory was dominant germ theory was just that. Does rely on accepting "cleaning things" as medicine. It's certainly a great way to prevent disease. Does it count as "alternative preventative medicine"?

mehrdadn 6y ago
By "alternative medicine" I'm not talking 19th century views here, especially given the comparison to AI. Can you pick something from like the past half-century or so? Which people called alternative medicine but which now they call medicine?
- waterheater 6y ago
  The modern medical field has authorities who largely determine what is medicine and what is "alternative medicine." I can't imagine anything which today is considered "medicine" that isn't approved by the FDA; can you? AI doesn't have such an authority. New AI methods can be deployed without asking for permission from a governing body. 19th century views on medicine is actually a better comparison than something from the last fifty years, because advancements in modern medicine is largely shaped by governing authorities.
  - esperent 6y ago
    The FDA is a US body, so if you take a global perspective I'm sure you'll find lots of examples of things that are 'alternative medicine' according to the FDA but just 'medicine' according to the equivalent bodies in other countries. Someone brought up St. John's Wort as an example above, apparently now legitimate in some European countries.

zeveb 6y ago

ISTR that seaweed was a folk remedy for goiter. It contains relatively high amounts of iodine, which prevents thyroid conditions. I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.

mehrdadn 6y ago
Is that an example from the 15th century? Is there nothing more modern?
- mattkrause 6y ago
  Seems to me that's the whole point? Effective treatments as been subsumed into "mainstream" medicine, perhaps with a bit of purification/standardization along the way, while the ineffective and unproven stuff remains "alternative medicine". If it somehow turns out that homeopathy is an effective therapy for something (besides dehydration), it'll end up with a procedure code, the hospital pharmacy will stock 10x tincture of whatever, and eventually it will be just another mainstream medical treatment.

mam2 6y ago

Mdma in the future

esperent 6y ago
We can hope. Along with various psychedelics and ketamine.

trhway 6y ago

artemisinin. Has been used for millenia to effectively treat a lot of things (naturally so because of its being super-peroxide), anecdotally/personally - the wormwood was part of the folk medicine toolbox of my Ukrainian grandmother, yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin "It was discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who was co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery.[2] " There are "scientific/medicine" results these days what it even works against cancer, for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/

the_jeremy 6y ago

These aren't "finding loopholes in the question". Most "alternative medicine" things that work aren't new information. Humans have had literal millenia to figure out how to deal with ailments. The easiest methods that people can think of to try to solve a problem have been done by someone, and were passed around when they worked. There's things like "gargle with salt water to cure a sore throat". That's commonly done remedy that was done forever and we now understand the science behind it. This page[0] labels it under an "alternative medicine" tag, as does this page[1]: [0]: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wlth-salt-water-ease-a-sore-throat#1 https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wl... [1]: https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/article/home-remedies-mom-right-about https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/artic...

mehrdadn 6y ago
The entire premise of this discussion was that modern medicine currently has a flaw/double-standard/whatever about what it considers alternative medicine. Bringing up examples where medicine was flawed a century ago is very much finding a loophole and missing the point of the question.
- biddlesby 6y ago
  I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. The conclusion then is that there are things we consider medicine today that used to be alternative medicine.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    > I'm not so sure. I think the task is to find a treatment and a point in time where the treatment was considered alternative medicine, was then proven to work, and thereafter was considered medicine. That would imply examples from 400 BC would have the same relevance as examples from 50 years ago. I assumed it was obvious that that's not the case, but it seems I was wrong.

currymj 6y ago

Artemisinin is an antimalarial drug derived from a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fevers, including malaria. First discovered and isolated in 1972. St. John's Wort started out as alternative medicine but is now officially approved and prescribed for treating depression in many European countries -- I believe this got started in the 1990s. I think this kind of thing is quite rare in medicine, though. Whereas it's not hard to find stuff that was done by AI researchers that somehow no longer counts as AI.

mehrdadn 6y ago
Awesome, thanks for the examples. It got me going in a direction I didn't expect the discussion to go though: were these examples of traditional medicine or alternative medicine? They seem to be the former whereas this discussion was about the latter - alternative and traditional medicine are not the same thing [1]: > Complementary medicine refers to therapies that complement traditional western (or allopathic) medicine and is used together with conventional medicine, and alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. Alternative medicine refers to therapeutic approaches taken in place of traditional medicine and used to treat or ameliorate disease. The difference (as I've understood it anyway) is "alternative medicine" implies you contradict modern medical practices, which was the basis for the comment I replied to. And which (I guess not surprisingly) medical experts recommend against. So I think the kind of example you'd want is a medical treatment that modern medicine previously recommended against, but that ended up vouching later. Because this was all a response to a comment that suggested people had a double-standard and were moving the goalposts or something like that (hence the AI comparison). Merely showing the science went from "we don't know if X is a good idea" to "we know X is a good idea" isn't finding an inconsistency. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068720/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068720/
- currymj 6y ago
  I can't think of any of those from recent history. Medicine has gotten pretty good. Exceptions may be in mental health. Somebody else mentioned psychedelic drugs, which might be FDA-approved for some conditions soon, but all official medical sources currently treat them as extremely dangerous. However, I do think cherry-picking the effective treatments from naturopathy and TCM and turning them into mainstream medicine is similar in spirit to cherry-picking the successful approaches from 80s and 90s AI research and turning them into "just algorithms". But there are a lot more successful old-school AI techniques than there are effective alternative medicine treatments.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

The Australian doctor who proved ulcers and stomach cancer could be caused by bacterial infection was dismissed until he inoculated himself and cured it with antibiotics. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

mehrdadn 6y ago
That is incredible and terrifying. Thanks for sharing!
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I'm personally very grateful to that doctor. I used to suffer from quite painful stomach ulcers in my teens. I was scheduled for an endoscopy but the doctor I was referred to had obviously heard of this research. One week of antibiotics later and I have never suffered from it again.

alchemism 6y ago

“Holistic Nursing” is a serious effort at legitimizing what would have been considered New Age medicine 50 years ago. http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284072679/Chapter5_Sample.pdf http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284072679/Chapter5_Sample.pdf

akiselev 6y ago

I may be off on this but I believe low carb diets as a treatment for prediabetics/diabetics was considered pseudoscience for decades by most doctors [1], largely associated with fad diets like Atkins and keto. Over the last decade or two that has slowly been changing. Holistic approaches in general have been gaining steam and taking back that word from the naturopaths. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188071/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188071/

Izkata 6y ago

I have an interesting one from within the past month, although I don't think the phrase "alternative medicine" was used: Trump was mocked in the media for asking if getting UV light inside the body was a possible treatment for covid19, as if he was suggesting an alternative medicine treatment. And light therapy does have that long a history. Thing is, this is not only a known treatment used in the past (only falling out of favor in the 50s), there are studies from the past few decades about how well UV light works on viruses, and it really is being investigated today for use on SARS-CoV-2.