A deceptive curing practice in hunter–Gatherer societies | Hacker News Reader

A deceptive curing practice in hunter–Gatherer societies

mdpi.com

31 pointsexolymph14 comments

MDPI has some... ...ahem dubious practices, and may well be a predatory publisher. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5493177/

Yes, I was wondering what the hell they did to my "back" button. Then I saw that I had "visited" the page something like 8 or 10 times just by clicking the article link here. How the hell does that work? And why?

How -> history API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

It was designed to accommodate highly JS-driven sites/apps, where user rarely, if ever, clicks on regular <a href="">, but notion of "going back" is still a thing.

Of course, this API also opened floodgates to all sorts of scammers.

As an academic that has published in, and reviewed for several MDPI journals, this total nonsense- they are a legitimate publisher. I haven't seen any signs of them being corrupt, predatory, or dishonest. Many of their niche journals are well respected in narrow sub-fields, and seem to be good quality. They also have very modern publication/typesetting/submission workflows that make them a pleasure to work with vs the older closed access journals. I would say they have lower standards for 'impact' vs more prestigious journals.... which means they play a valuable role in the field- they publish mostly technical methods, and other results that are interesting and useful to a narrow specialized audience.

Thank you for the feedback, I'm not at all an academic, so I'm curious as to your thoughts on the article I linked to?

Tell me I am not the only one who clicked on wondering how old societies had a fake bacon problem.

"Elkin (1949) notes further that among the Pitjantjatjara and other Australian groups, a medicine man would often seek out a colleague for treatment when he himself was sick".

I often wonder if magnetizers/Energy medicine healers and other charlatans believe in what they do and if they would seek the assistance of their colleagues when sick.

This title is deceptive itself. From the abstract

"This and similar tricks can be highly deceptive, but they can also be undertaken for entertainment, symbolic reasons, their placebo-like utility to sick patients, or some mixture of each"

*can be* not *is*

This title is copied from the paper, but I don't like it.

I didn't get a pejorative vibe from the title and the abstract

> The recurrent invention of the trick across independent societies, as well as its cultural inheritance and diffusion between groups, indicates that it likely appeals to certain universal facets of human psychology, where experiences of sickness and pain commonly induce one to seek interventive cures from specialists, who in turn may use deceptive displays to give the appearance of greater skill and powers.

But now you've mentioned it, I can see how it would read that way. I think they're just being straightforward though.

I think some would group some modern surgeries in this area too, thinking particularly of back surgery that may be a very complicated and dangerous placebo in some cases.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/back-pain-try-some-placebo-s...

Wait till you hear about the deceptive process of "Kurdaitcha" in the aboriginal communities. I imagine there was similar behavior across most hunter-gather societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdaitcha

> All deaths are considered to be the result of evil spirits or spells, usually influenced by an enemy.

wonder if that has something to do with the sleeping on the road thing

Psychosomatic death is an actual thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_death

It all starts with “I got your nose!”

What is the success rate of the 'Magic' based treatments vs Medical Establishment treatment?

Myself I'd trust the Witchdoctor more than the Medical Establishment doctors from personal experiences with the latter.

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