Weird Soviet devices cure diseases | Hacker News Reader

Weird Soviet devices cure diseases

rbth.com

22 pointsgeorgecmu9 comments

> Magnetic therapy

The practice is still pervasive in CIS/Russian medicine despite being considered pseudoscience[1] by the rest of the world. You're almost guaranteed to be prescribed electromagnetic therapy if you're recovering from any sort of tissue injury.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_therapy

In the late 2000's I was prescribed a magnetic "bone stimulator." (not to be confused with the implanted ones that are electrical and may actually work) -- and this was in California.

I also had same, in Vancouver BC recovering from broken tibia, early nineties. After one session, I considered it quackery and never went again.

It is absolute quackery-- as if a 9v battery an generate enough of a magnetic field to alter anything.

I had a gap in my malleous bone several millimeters tall.

I felt it was a insurance delaying tactic-- a way to postpone the needed surgery to just see if things got better on their own. This bone break lasted literally, 18 months.

Several strange devices. Not clear to me how well they actually worked. I imagine you could write a listicle about any number of strange devices from anywhere if you didn't restrict yourself to writing about things that actually worked. For example, there are "healing magnets" in the US too. Do they work?

I'm highly skeptical of some of those too. Especially considering that US medicine for many years did knee surgery that turned out to have no positive effects I have very little hope of medical world to root out ineffective practices quickly.

Or learn new things. This pandemic shows that medical world learns very slowly. So many sick, so many cases to examine and learn from. And only after a year or more of this pandemic we learn that Covid can cause long term impairment of IQ, cause impotence and is still present in tissues of people who got it, long after they "recovered". We still don't know which drugs might be helping and we don't routinely use drugs that we have some clues might be more efficient, even though we use other drugs from the same group that seem to have way less efficiency (budesonide, vs any other steroid, like hydrocortisone or dexamethasone).