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Eben Byers was a victim of quack medicine, much like people nowadays who try to use magnets and sugar water to cure cancer. Bringing him up in a discussion of r
by chc 13y ago
Eben Byers was a victim of quack medicine, much like people nowadays who try to use magnets and sugar water to cure cancer. Bringing him up in a discussion of real medicine is frankly an insult to the researchers who do this stuff.
- wpietri 13y agoOnce you're done stroking your outrage gland, you might note that I didn't suggest an equivalence between these researchers and, well, anybody. I was talking about ideas made appealing by ignorance, ones that are dumb only in retrospect. The patent medicine Byers took was legal. Indeed his doctor recommended it to him. Unsurprising given that its seller, William J. A. Bailey, offered doctors a 17% kickback to prescribe the stuff. Even after this product was banned (because it finally killed a rich guy?), Bailey was never prosecuted, and continued to sell radium-related products after this. He died wealthy and free at the age of 64, nearly 14 years after killing Byers, and who knows how many other people. It's a fine example of what I was talking about, where erring on the side of the shiny and new was not a good heuristic; the people who stuck with the traditional and natural did better for themselves despite Bailey and Byers surely scoffing at them.