7 ms·

Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked, so what is the reason for trying that specific traditional method?

unclad5968 2y ago
The only thing I can find is that heating too fast might cause gangrene.
bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked That's a bold claim!
- krisoft 2y ago
  Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence. Or maybe people understood initially that you should do the rubbing next to a fire. And then the rubbing only has positive efect because it lets the person administering it feel when the heat is too much, and naturally adjusts the distance to prevent burns or injury from too fast warming up. Or maybe someone told people to do it because they thought it might help and never bothered to check if it does anything or not. Or maybe people did know it does nothing but there was no other option and doing something about the injury felt better than doing nothing. Maybe it was doing mechanically nothing but the care and personal touch had a beneficial effect due to placebo. Maybe it made the injury worse, thus more likely that they amputated and paradoxically that saved the injured from worse outcomes like gangrene. There is so many other possibility than “if they did it it must have worked”. Who knows.
norgie 2y ago
This was addressed in the accepted answer: > rapid rewarming from open campfires or other sources of dry heat caused so much devastation.....Dry heat from ....open fires....cannot be controlled. Excessively high temperatures are usually produced, resulting in a combined burn and frostbite, a devasting injury that leads to far greater tissue loss. Sounds like it was an overreaction to applying excessive heat to the frostbitten tissue.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  No it was a full alternative to it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hiatus 2y ago
> Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  Oddly, electroconvulsive therapy seemes to have panned out.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Electroconvulsive therapy is about as effective as bloodletting. There are conditions for which bloodletting is an effective treatment, such as iron overload. But in most people, and under most circumstances, losing meaningful quantities of blood leads to long-term injury and/or death. Likewise, electrocuting the nervous system often causes permanent disability and/or death, and is a fairly effective torture method. Lobotomy, too, can be an effective treatment for epilepsy. But I'm sure we can all agree that certain people in the past were way too quick to resort to it. (The Soviet Union banned it in the 1950s, on human rights grounds.) Likewise, I'm rather worried by the high incidence of involuntary (read: forced, non-consensual) electroconvulsive therapy. 10% is way too high, and I've seen numbers higher than that…
- toast0 2y ago
  (Clean) leeches are actually pretty handy sometimes. Bloodletting is standard of care for hemochromotosis; you can use leeches for that, but just drawing blood is probably more efficient; some blood banks will let you donate it, some say no because the donation isn't supposed to be of benefit to the donor. Certainly, a lot of conditions where bloodletting was used don't warrant it, but it's not altogther bad. I don't think there's a good use case for a lobotomy, though.
robbiep 2y ago
Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever? Whilst 1956 seems to be a fairly late date to stop what would seem in the surface to be a counter intuitive practice, 80 years earlier blood letting was still in vogue
- exe34 2y ago
  people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    And people "manifest" and somehow don't wonder why randomly "it works" or "doesn't work". "Must've done something wrong while manifesting this time :shrug:" :facepalm: !!!!!1111eleven
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.
      - tharkun__ 2y ago
        Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect). If someone uses religion (or manifesting) to go down the path of "god helps those that help themselves", all the power to them! (as long as they don't make me believe in it) I really am talking about people like that one radio moderator I was thinking of when making the comment: was "manifesting" all day yesterday so that someone would win the x-thousand dollars in the contest on their show this morning. Was "manifesting" getting tickets for Taylor Swif as well recently. Stuff like that. Like you said, all just manifesting "lottery ticket" type stuff. Magical thinking basically. Just "sit around and manifest and it'll happen". That's the :facepalm: stuff.
riccardomc 2y ago
Clearly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_against_COVID-19 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_aga...
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked Now do trepanation and corpse medicine. Like, look around you. We’re a stupid species. Not consistently. But a lot. We’ve always been a bunch of apes banging around.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now Sure. Population growth is exponential. Deifying ancient knowledge is over-attributing knowledge to when we had little in both knowledge per person and persons per se. Sanctifying traditional medicine means you’re out of ideas. You aren’t bad. But move on.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      See my above comment
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        Still deifying traditional practice. Trepanation doesn’t do anything for seizures. Was commonly prescribed for them. We stopped doing that after discovering what caused them. The list goes on and on.

unclad5968 2y ago

The only thing I can find is that heating too fast might cause gangrene.

bqmjjx0kac 2y ago

> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked That's a bold claim!

krisoft 2y ago
Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence. Or maybe people understood initially that you should do the rubbing next to a fire. And then the rubbing only has positive efect because it lets the person administering it feel when the heat is too much, and naturally adjusts the distance to prevent burns or injury from too fast warming up. Or maybe someone told people to do it because they thought it might help and never bothered to check if it does anything or not. Or maybe people did know it does nothing but there was no other option and doing something about the injury felt better than doing nothing. Maybe it was doing mechanically nothing but the care and personal touch had a beneficial effect due to placebo. Maybe it made the injury worse, thus more likely that they amputated and paradoxically that saved the injured from worse outcomes like gangrene. There is so many other possibility than “if they did it it must have worked”. Who knows.

norgie 2y ago

This was addressed in the accepted answer: > rapid rewarming from open campfires or other sources of dry heat caused so much devastation.....Dry heat from ....open fires....cannot be controlled. Excessively high temperatures are usually produced, resulting in a combined burn and frostbite, a devasting injury that leads to far greater tissue loss. Sounds like it was an overreaction to applying excessive heat to the frostbitten tissue.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
No it was a full alternative to it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hiatus 2y ago

> Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
Oddly, electroconvulsive therapy seemes to have panned out.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Electroconvulsive therapy is about as effective as bloodletting. There are conditions for which bloodletting is an effective treatment, such as iron overload. But in most people, and under most circumstances, losing meaningful quantities of blood leads to long-term injury and/or death. Likewise, electrocuting the nervous system often causes permanent disability and/or death, and is a fairly effective torture method. Lobotomy, too, can be an effective treatment for epilepsy. But I'm sure we can all agree that certain people in the past were way too quick to resort to it. (The Soviet Union banned it in the 1950s, on human rights grounds.) Likewise, I'm rather worried by the high incidence of involuntary (read: forced, non-consensual) electroconvulsive therapy. 10% is way too high, and I've seen numbers higher than that…
toast0 2y ago
(Clean) leeches are actually pretty handy sometimes. Bloodletting is standard of care for hemochromotosis; you can use leeches for that, but just drawing blood is probably more efficient; some blood banks will let you donate it, some say no because the donation isn't supposed to be of benefit to the donor. Certainly, a lot of conditions where bloodletting was used don't warrant it, but it's not altogther bad. I don't think there's a good use case for a lobotomy, though.

robbiep 2y ago

Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever? Whilst 1956 seems to be a fairly late date to stop what would seem in the surface to be a counter intuitive practice, 80 years earlier blood letting was still in vogue

exe34 2y ago
people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  And people "manifest" and somehow don't wonder why randomly "it works" or "doesn't work". "Must've done something wrong while manifesting this time :shrug:" :facepalm: !!!!!1111eleven
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.
    - tharkun__ 2y ago
      Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect). If someone uses religion (or manifesting) to go down the path of "god helps those that help themselves", all the power to them! (as long as they don't make me believe in it) I really am talking about people like that one radio moderator I was thinking of when making the comment: was "manifesting" all day yesterday so that someone would win the x-thousand dollars in the contest on their show this morning. Was "manifesting" getting tickets for Taylor Swif as well recently. Stuff like that. Like you said, all just manifesting "lottery ticket" type stuff. Magical thinking basically. Just "sit around and manifest and it'll happen". That's the :facepalm: stuff.

riccardomc 2y ago

Clearly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_against_COVID-19 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_aga...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked Now do trepanation and corpse medicine. Like, look around you. We’re a stupid species. Not consistently. But a lot. We’ve always been a bunch of apes banging around.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now Sure. Population growth is exponential. Deifying ancient knowledge is over-attributing knowledge to when we had little in both knowledge per person and persons per se. Sanctifying traditional medicine means you’re out of ideas. You aren’t bad. But move on.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    See my above comment
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      Still deifying traditional practice. Trepanation doesn’t do anything for seizures. Was commonly prescribed for them. We stopped doing that after discovering what caused them. The list goes on and on.