Quotes of the week

The problem isn't actually medicine, it's human nature. Aspirin is an example of a product where voodoo medicine clearly worked, so people set out to find out *why*.

Actually it was somewhat different: The willow-based folk medicines sorta-kinda worked, and earlier in the 19th century, people managed to extract the active ingredient, salicin. Later on, salicylic acid (which is what salicin is converted into in your body after you take it) was manufactured on an industrial scale and sold as a pharmaceutical, but it tasted terrible and had unpleasant side effects. Acetylsalicylic acid was researched and invented by the pharmaceutical industry (Bayer, to be exact) as a way to deal with these issues – so it was emphatically not “voodoo medicine” – and marketed very successfully, but it still took a very long time to figure out exactly why it works, even while it was being used in great quantities by satisfied customers.

All *looked* *down* *on* as voodoo, until suddenly someone realised that actually, they seem to work.

The problem with bloodletting, of course, is that in the good old days of pre-scientific medicine, it used to be pretty much the standard therapy for everything, and you could count yourself lucky if between the bloodletting and the mercury pills you didn't end up way worse than if you hadn't gone to see the doctor in the first place, so no, for the most part it didn't actually work. Homeopathy got off to a great start when it was new because it was basically a fancy way of doing nothing at all, which at the time from the patient's POV was an option that was preferable by far to being made worse or even getting killed by the barbaric therapies such as bloodletting that were the widely-accepted “standard of care”. (Remember also that the revolutionary idea of cleaning one's knife between patients hadn't got traction yet – that took until the mid-19th century, when bloodletting was already on its way out, and even then proved to be an uphill battle in the medical profession.) Nowadays we have remedies that actually make the patients get better instead of merely not killing them, and therefore homeopathy, even though not “folk medicine”, has ended up where it belongs, on the “voodoo” side of medical interventions, along with cow dung, acupuncture, and (for most diagnoses) bloodletting.