[StopTheWorld]

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou.

During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.

One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.

[Aurornis]

> Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results.

TCM is interesting: There are countless different TCM preparations that do nearly nothing are can be actively harmful to the kidneys or liver, but every once in a while there is a a novel compound discovered in some plant somewhere that does something.

I can’t tell how much of this is because TCM has some treatments that actually work, or if it’s a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. I suspect it’s more of the latter.

[djtango]

Just because we have made innovations in the method of research and discovery doesn't mean that we should throw away everything that we had before.

Around me I see practices like "gratitude", "meditation" and "breathing exercises" get bandied around like they're some new profound thing as if we hadn't known about for thousands of years that have appeared in various guises universally throughout different civilisations.

Just because the metaphors and models of explanations could be flawed doesn't mean the effects should be thrown out

Edit: I have a good friend, a scientist no less, who suffered from severe eczema and was completely let down by western medicine who was put through decades of progressively stronger and stronger steroids. Nothing worked. Eventually the doctors gave up and shrugged their shoulders and was advised to give "alternative medicine" a go. Desperate my friend visited a traditional Chinese doctor who was prepared to guide them through a rigorous exclusion diet while also preparing mystery herb soup and suddenly a lifetime of eczema subsided and became very manageable.

The older I get the more determined I find myself trying to glean the accrued wisdom of people who came before us...

[nsoonhui]

A lot of scientists dabbled into pseudoscience but that doesn't invalidate their scientific accomplishment, and their scientific achievement doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit

[dkarl]

> doesn't validate their pseudoscientific pursuit

If you take an idea with a pseudoscientific origin, and you test it in a sound scientific way, you're doing science, not pseudoscience.