LessWrong Meetup
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Joshua Fox יהושע פוקס
Jul 30, 2016, 2:38:00 PM7/30/16
to LessWrong Tel Aviv
Daniel Armak will present the book "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates" by David Wootton.
Tuesday, August 2 at 7 PM
The main thesis of the book, which will be discussed in the talk, is:
1. Since the beginnings of Western medicine in the first millenium BC, and until the 18th century or so, professional doctors never did any good (other than placebo effects). They did a great deal of harm. After 1800, the amount of good interventions grew until they outweighted the harm around the year 1940.
2. Almost noone believed this at the time, or tried to test the efficacy of medicine, even hundreds of years after the acceptance of evidence and experiment-based science in other fields. Instruments like the microscope were rejected.
3. Some doctors started doing proper trials in the 19th century. They had clear proof that medicine wasn't just useless, it was actively harmful. But this didn't affect widespread practice.
4. Things didn't get better until the mid-20th century.
The big question, which the book poses but doesn't try to answer, is - why? And what other fields might be like this today?
The meetup will take place on the rooftop of the Cluster, in Yigal Alon 116 Tel Aviv.
The main thesis of the book, which will be discussed in the talk, is:
1. Since the beginnings of Western medicine in the first millenium BC, and until the 18th century or so, professional doctors never did any good (other than placebo effects). They did a great deal of harm. After 1800, the amount of good interventions grew until they outweighted the harm around the year 1940.
2. Almost noone believed this at the time, or tried to test the efficacy of medicine, even hundreds of years after the acceptance of evidence and experiment-based science in other fields. Instruments like the microscope were rejected.
3. Some doctors started doing proper trials in the 19th century. They had clear proof that medicine wasn't just useless, it was actively harmful. But this didn't affect widespread practice.
4. Things didn't get better until the mid-20th century.
The big question, which the book poses but doesn't try to answer, is - why? And what other fields might be like this today?
The meetup will take place on the rooftop of the Cluster, in Yigal Alon 116 Tel Aviv.
Joshua Fox יהושע פוקס
Aug 2, 2016, 1:58:31 AM8/2/16
to LessWrong Tel Aviv
This has been moved one half hour, meeting at 19:30.
By the way -- I know several people who do not check Facebook yet are interested, so let's keep posting announcements to this Google Group.
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