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Comment by Plankaluel | Hacker News Reader

Just because something has been done for hundreds of years does not mean it has been scientifically shown to actually do more than placebo. A lot of people do a lot of stuff that has been proven to do nothing detectable, and they still swear by it.

"It has been done for hundreds of years" isn't a good argument. There is a reason "Appeal to tradition" is one of the more famous logical fallacies.

Also: The radiation doses used in this trial are very likely much, much higher than what you would get from such a bath in radioactive water (otherwise the water would be so radioactive that staying in there or even drinking it would kill you very quickly), so this doesn't really tell us anything about whether the traditional modalities do anything or not. And yes, stuff like that also exists in Austria with Radon caves, and many other places.

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Modern medicine is hardly logical where therapies are concerned. There is often not any coherent theory of why a therapy works and yet it may be commonly used in treatments. If you examine the literature supplied with your drugs, it often states "exact mechanism of action is unknown but yada yada". This is why there are double blind studies in medicine. Absent a theory, this is the only way to gauge the effectiveness of a therapy. Hence, if bathing in slightly radioactive waters has provided beneficial to people over a long period of time, you can't dismiss it as "appealing to tradition". It may need validation with a study but can't be ignored as just tradition.

The fact that it's been done over a long period of time does not prove that it's beneficial. As you say, that's why there are double-blind studies. If the only evidence of benefit is that it's been done for a long time, that literally is just tradition. It's worth looking into it to see if it works, but there are plenty of traditional remedies with long histories that don't.

Good point! Interestingly there is evidence that at least some life forms appear to benefit from 'highly radioactive' water.

https://hal.science/hal-03025146v1/file/Petit%20et%20al%2020...

"Direct Meta-Analyses Reveal Unexpected Microbial Life in the Highly Radioactive Water of an Operating Nuclear Reactor Core"

https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/spectrum.01995-22

"Culturomics of Bacteria from Radon-Saturated Water of the World’s Oldest Radium Mine"

perhaps an experiment has verbally controlled its inputs and outputs in analyzing the effect of an independant variable upon a dependant variable. this does not imply that that those inputs and outputs were actually controlled for , nor does it imply that any found correlations are inherently causative. between folk wisdom that kinda works vs. corporate advice that also kinda works but happens to make someone a huge profit ....... ill take the thermal baths first

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