History of medicine
Quacks, Mountebanks, Big Pharma
July 6, 2024 — July 6, 2024
The most visceral case study of the history and philosophy of science For thousands of years, physicians have been an esteemed profession, and yet they have only been a net benefit to their patients for the last hundred years, by some estimates. What does that say about our connection to effectiveness? About prestige? About our ability to evaluate the effectiveness of our institutions? About the influence of literal skin in the metaphorical game?
1 Case Study: Airborne transmission
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill (Randall et al. 2021).
2 Incoming
the constant on medicine
The Dream podcast on wellness
- The Dream season 2 is about wellness
- ‘The Dream’ Podcast Review: Is the Wellness Industry a Scam?
3 Medicalisation
See medicalisation.
4 Incoming
Ben Krauss, The strange history of osteopathic medicine
Kelsey Piper, Scientific fraud solutions: Should research misconduct be illegal?
That is, the policy which Poldermans had recommended using falsified data, adopted in Europe on the basis of his research, was actually dramatically increasing the odds people would die in surgery.
Millions of surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner.