The only reason I keep Facebook is for unhinged stuff like this
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
280 points (98.6% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
40981 readers
3816 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Im all on the "listen to the medical experts" train.
There are however some medicines and treatments that legitimately started as "alternative".
A lot of it is horseshit though.
Also modern medicine isn't infallible(nor the people that practice it).
Statistically though, it's fucking high magic compared to most internet sourced diagnoses.
Have friends in the medical field, a lot of time they are just sort of trying shit and then are happy it worked.
Medical science is just that, medicine that follows the scientific method. (Or at least it's supposed to).
The scientific method is basically testing guesses (sometimes educated ones) and seeing what happens.
There's a whole lot of structure and guidelines, but testing guesses(hypotheses) is where it's at mostly.
The current state of any science is usually "the best theory we have right now, given the data and resources available to us"
Some people hear that and think "look, they're just guessing, why should I listen to them?" and thats absolutely valid.
Where that falls down is that they then go on to assume all guesses are equal and ignore the time and resources that went in to that current scientific best guess.
Is it always correct? no, is it more likely to be beneficial than a random social media post by an influencer with no medical expertise? Generally yes.
The people who "guess" are guessing way down the decision tree, not like hmm is this cancer or a flu?
They also are highly trained, in a field that is centuries old.
Indeed, though I'd argue that's an issue with modern academia as an industry rather than the scientific method itself.
edit: not that the scientific method doesn't have it's flaws.
I would expand "testing guesses" to repeatedly testing guesses. It's a fundamental thing to be able to recreate the testing results, or it's not science at all it's just fuckign around lol
An important distinction.
Most professions could be described like this, but when doctors are "trying shit" it is backed up by many years of training and education, and their behavior is scrutinised by professional bodies and so on.
When your local quack is "trying shit" it's just based on the vibe.
Am engineer and agree
The difference between medicine and "alternative medicine" is proof of effectiveness. If something provably works it's medicine.
"Alternative medicine" is too broad a term to be helpful.
Yeah, I saw it after I'd posted.
I need to be more specific in how I mean "alternative" here.
What I mean is "not of the current scientific consensus" , which I realise isn't exactly the same wording as the wikipedia definition
Thats my bad.
I also failed to mention that it also works the other way as well, where current science is discredited(fully or partially) , due to flaws in it's methodology, reproducibility or some other reason.
I think there are actually very few interventions which were "not of the current scientific consensus" which later became accepted medical practice.
Also I think in the current era there are practically no alternative therapies by that definition which will later become medical practice.
A salient example might be ketamine therapy. It's been a party drug since at least the 90s but in the last several years has become a government subsidised therapy for PTSD in Australia. That doesn't mean kids at ravfes were doing the therapy in the 90s, because the manner in which the ketamine is administered is the key to the beneficial outcome.
That said, I think the treatments a medical doctor can prescribe or even recommend are less than a third of the treatments or behaviors that can manage a chronic illness. What I mean is, if you have a chronic condition there's (hopefully) medications that will help you manage it, but it's the lifestyle changes that will influence your quality of life in the coming decades.
Yeah the only ones I can think of that used to be used the current medical way are cannabis for appetite and analgesia and psychadelics for ptsd and addiction. Both of these examples are obvious to anyone who's used such substances.
Cannabis just makes you hungry and hurt less. Traumatized people who do psychedelics tend to revisit their trauma in new lights and having a guide to help with it is something a lot of people figured out was a good idea.
The quote is from Tim Minchin. I think the track name is Storm.
It's him talking to someone at a dinner party and he's trying to bite his tongue when someone new starts talking stupidity, but it gets to a point where he breaks and goes off on a rent.
It's a very well written and entertaining bit.
What what's missing from the quote is something along the lines of "You know what they call alternate medicine that is proven to work? Medicine"
The whole point of the quote is exactly what you are saying that some medicines legitimately started as alternative medicines
Edit: i realize now it might not have been a quote at all regardless of how similar it is the that Tim Minchin bit
From Dara Ó Briain. Also from him:
What are those?
I think it depends how you frame this question. For example, aspirin originated from a compound in willow bark. Currently, most of us aren’t chewing on willow bark to relieve pain, but at some point that (or making willow bark teas, etc.) was the case. Whether you consider that as “alternative” depends on what point in history you ask that question.
Leeches, which are still used today, also come to mind. Modern medicine has greatly refined how they’re used, but that’s not how it started.
There are quite a few things that people noticed produced effects but didn’t understand the mechanism. Science changed that.
However, if you consider using things with known properties in a wildly irresponsible manner as the definition of “alternative medicine,” that’s a very different question.
Even when novel therapies from existing medicine do come to light at times, generally this through scientific observation and testing, not Cletus taking horse medicine.
At the time mainstream medicine was rejecting use of willow bark? Or why it's considered alternative medicine?
Aspirin.
Was a tincture or tea of white willow used as a folk medicine for generations until it got studied and the compound in it isolated by Bayer
Cocaine.
Indigenous population would chew coca leaves as a stimulant for various reasons and someone figured found out about it, studied it, and found out how to isolate the active compound and now we have Cocaine
Opiates
Opium Poppy was used for centuries for a variety of uses, but mostly recreational in the form of opium, then it got studied and turned into some of the most effective painkillers we have. (Morphine, codeine, heroin are naturally derived opium compounds, some others are synthetic or a blend such as oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl, carfentanyl)
Edit: ~~white birch bark(I'm not 100% certain this is the right tree, but it was a tree, please correct me if I'm wrong)~~ found the correction in another comment
Usually herbs found by ethnographers.
Aspirin, for example, IIRC discovered by a scientist investigating traditional therapeutics (tree bark)
My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn't properly understood.
That's the best argument for alternative medicines that I've heard, and it's also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.
That wasn't a blocker with antidepressants, for better or worse.
I wonder if there because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how the brain create thoughts. It's so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created
I was also going to use aspirin as an example, there is also psychedelics as a treatment for various psychological ailments.
I'm also going to post a response i made to a comment further up.
In generalities i was thinking more of how certain branches or offshoots of what was considered to be mainstream ( or mainstream adjacent ) science were later found to be scientifically provable.
An example of this is microbes.
They were posited over the years in varied forms by multiple independent people, but they weren't really fully accepted until the invention of a way of actually observing them.
This is largely what medicine was prior to the current , formal scientific method. Local "medicine people" would have salves, cures, potions and other such concoctions passed down to apprentices, they might have some knowledge of how it works, but most of that knowledge would be in the practical application and treatment using said concoctions.
That's not to dismiss this practice, the years of experience and experimentation (of a kind) was, in some cases, essentially a precursor to modern scientific method.
There are ways of analysing effects and positing theories without fully understanding how the underlying mechanism works.
Sometimes that leads to legitimate data around the effects of a medicine or treatment being dismissed as "alternative", at least until formal experimentation is done and verified
As i said in another reply, I'm not saying it's common, all i was saying was that it's a possibility.
I think it's safe to say nowadays we can rely on scientific method to find new cures, and completely abandon "alternative" medicine.
Well said. A balanced viewpoint that doesn't try to be all black and white. Even the stupidest bullshit can sometimes contain a kernel of truth. That doesn't mean the 99% bullshit isn't any less shit.
The issue is that alternative forms of medicine are most often studied scientifically and either found to work (upgraded to medicine) but more often than not it is found to have no greater effect than placebo or random chance, but these alternatives continue to be practiced, meaning people end up getting ineffective care, and their money is funneled into an industry incentivised to discredit and spread distrust towards real proven medicine