4 ms·

I'm always fascinated by the 'correctness' [1] of medicinal treatments in ancient times. Here, the paper explains that the ash tonic effectively served as a min

I'm always fascinated by the 'correctness' [1] of medicinal treatments in ancient times. Here, the paper explains that the ash tonic effectively served as a mineral supplement to promote bone healing. Is it just coincidence that they medicated in this manner, and it ended up being beneficial? Did they somehow know that the tonic was effective for these means? If so, how? Or is this just me weighting the 'correct' choice of remedies higher than the likely multitude of faulty choices that were made in those times? [1] Poor choice of word, but can't think of a better one

krivx 12y ago
A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire. They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
jeremyt 12y ago
Efficacy
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
benbreen 12y ago
I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure). So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg). In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
- pyre 12y ago
  > So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
  - wavegeek 12y ago
    I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
    - maximumoverload 12y ago
      >He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing I heard that's mostly a myth edit: there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer)
    - pyre 12y ago
      This post seems unrelated to my comment. Did you mean to respond to a different comment? > He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves. > Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury. It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
- Jun8 12y ago
  David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum. If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....
Detrus 12y ago
Athletes tend to stick to the same ritualized routine for months and years, which minimizes variables and helps them figure out which remedy really works.
Sone7 12y ago
My guess is that there is a capacity for instinct that leads some people to find the correct remedy for themselves. The way people with mineral deficiency might crave soil, could be similar to the way shamans in South America 'knew' to combine an MAOI found in one variety of tree bark with the DMT containing plant - out of tens of thousands of plant species. I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another. Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.
zaroth 12y ago
I was reading about Romans and lead poisoning on HN a couple weeks ago. I think this is just one case where it didn't happen to work out disastrously, but in many other cases the remedy was much worse than the disease.

krivx 12y ago

A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire. They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.

jeremyt 12y ago

Efficacy

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

benbreen 12y ago

I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure). So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg). In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.

pyre 12y ago
> So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
- wavegeek 12y ago
  I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
  - maximumoverload 12y ago
    >He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing I heard that's mostly a myth edit: there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer)
  - pyre 12y ago
    This post seems unrelated to my comment. Did you mean to respond to a different comment? > He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves. > Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury. It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
Jun8 12y ago
David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum. If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....

Detrus 12y ago

Athletes tend to stick to the same ritualized routine for months and years, which minimizes variables and helps them figure out which remedy really works.

Sone7 12y ago

My guess is that there is a capacity for instinct that leads some people to find the correct remedy for themselves. The way people with mineral deficiency might crave soil, could be similar to the way shamans in South America 'knew' to combine an MAOI found in one variety of tree bark with the DMT containing plant - out of tens of thousands of plant species. I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another. Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.

zaroth 12y ago

I was reading about Romans and lead poisoning on HN a couple weeks ago. I think this is just one case where it didn't happen to work out disastrously, but in many other cases the remedy was much worse than the disease.