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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Much of that post fails to adress the fact we lived thousands of years fine without the FDA and that the FDA commits some of the most egregious crimes by being wholly corrupt with a sliding door between corps and administrators and delaying life saying drugs for no reason. They have a huge amount of blood on their hands.

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> we lived thousands of years fine without the FDA

For those thousands of years our only medicine was "ground up unicorn toe".

I did not know that medecine was a 20th century science and that we lived in dark ages until the year 1899

We effectively did.

Look around where you are. Unless you're in the middle of a forest, pretty much every single thing you see is the result of scientific and technological advancements of the last 150 years. Half of it probably owes its existence to the oft forgotten chemical and petrochemical revolutions that started about 100 years ago.

Before that? Before the tail end of 19th century, we knew fuck all about anything. Medicine, in particular, graduated from voodoo and aforementioned "ground up unicorn toe" into a proper science and profession, also about 100 years ago.

It's really hard to overstate how different 20th century science and technology is from anything that came before. We've crossed a qualitative threshold there.

> Before that? Before the tail end of 19th century, we knew fuck all about anything. Medicine, in particular, graduated from voodoo and aforementioned "ground up unicorn toe" into a proper science and profession, also about 100 years ago.

Nevermind the thousands of plants with verified therapeutical effects across the world for centuries.

But yeah, old societies were completely clueless and a bunch of idiots and surely we have learnt nothing from them.

Yes we should absolutely go back to keeping our humors balanced, bleeding people, treating syphilis with mercury, dying of an infection from a minor injury and insane level of mother and infant mortality.

You're setting up a false equivalence when you imply that our position is that older societies were completely clueless.

Nobody is saying that. What we're saying is that the application of science to medicine and nutrition had an absolutely enormous effect, and before that, we didn't really have explanations- just empirical observations- of the effect of medicines.

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

As late as 1899, taking out a living person's heart couldn't be anything besides a gruesome execution. There wasn't the understanding to allow it to be survivable, and even the anaesthesia at the time was not really good enough for anything like that.

Now? Though still rare, it's just another thing you can have transplanted if you need it.

> But yeah, old societies were completely clueless and a bunch of idiots and surely we have learnt nothing from them.

Yes, they were, in comparison. They had neither predictive theoretical models, nor the tools to confirm and refine them - hell, for most history, they didn't even understand they need those things in the first place. Please appreciate that the period starting in late 19th century brought all the pieces together - the theoretical foundations, the observations, communications, precision manufacturing, the philosophy of science - they all added up to exponential growth across all scientific disciplines, and all occupations.

That's not to say we didn't learn anything from them. They did accumulate knowledge. But the sum of all knowledge humanity accumulated since beginning of recorded history is just a rounding error compared to what humanity accumulated in the last 100 years. That's the exponential growth at work.

Pretty close, maybe more like mid-19th century as far as the "chemistry side" is concerned.

I'd push things back to around 1800, when the study of medicine became more scientific.

You should try reading up on it then. Like how life expectancy absolutly sky rocketed from the end of the 19th century.

I guess this is sarcastic? But yes, things have gotten a lot better since we invented antibiotics, modern surgery, routine childbirth, and other lifesaving medical techniques...

> Much of that post fails to adress the fact we lived thousands of years fine without the FDA

...

We've lived for thousands of years without the National Transportation Safety Board. Why do we need it? What it do? Planes not falling out of the sky? Meh. Boring.

This libertarian "burn the government down" bullshit is exhausting. REALLY itching to eat some bad meat and croak? Because this is what happened before. Then the responsible people said "maybe we should have someone checking that so that our citizens don't get sick and die".

It's called a Civilization. Welcome.

Maybe the answer is to fix it, not destroy it? Is the FDA a revolving door? Yes. Many regulatory agencies are.

The politicians who complain the most are the ones most ok with the government being a corrupt dumpster fire. Helps the narrative, and the rubes are eating it all up.

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