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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fair to call most medical treatments unnatural. That doesn't make them bad, but it should make us thoughtful and careful. Natural systems are often, thanks to evolution and adaptation, complicated and delicately balanced.

I think reflexive appeals to tradition and novelty are both kind of dumb. But if people are going to err, I'd rather they erred on the side of tradition: at least that shit has been demonstrated to work in one fashion or another. I always try to keep in mind examples like Eben Byers [1], the THERAC 25 [2], and rabbits in Australia [3]. All sorts of stupid ideas look appealing at first.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers

[2] http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on...

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Eben Byers was a victim of quack medicine, much like people nowadays who try to use magnets and sugar water to cure cancer. Bringing him up in a discussion of real medicine is frankly an insult to the researchers who do this stuff.

Once you're done stroking your outrage gland, you might note that I didn't suggest an equivalence between these researchers and, well, anybody. I was talking about ideas made appealing by ignorance, ones that are dumb only in retrospect.

The patent medicine Byers took was legal. Indeed his doctor recommended it to him. Unsurprising given that its seller, William J. A. Bailey, offered doctors a 17% kickback to prescribe the stuff. Even after this product was banned (because it finally killed a rich guy?), Bailey was never prosecuted, and continued to sell radium-related products after this. He died wealthy and free at the age of 64, nearly 14 years after killing Byers, and who knows how many other people.

It's a fine example of what I was talking about, where erring on the side of the shiny and new was not a good heuristic; the people who stuck with the traditional and natural did better for themselves despite Bailey and Byers surely scoffing at them.

One of the Therac-25 victims died 3 months later from cancer. Presumably the same cancer they were trying to treat, and thus avoided needing a hip replacement for the radiation damage. If your life is in such extreme danger from the disease itself, it can be worth taking risks with novel treatments. I'm sure some very old people with nothing to lose will be willing to try anti-aging, no matter how risky.

The supposedly good idea I'm referring to for the Therac-25 isn't radiation therapy. It was using software to make something snazzily digital, but in a way that ignored the novel safety issues with digital devices.

With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution. I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.

You seem to be arguing with a bunch of things I didn't say, while ignoring the things I did.

I'm a giant fan of technology, and there are many amazing advances in medical tech. But I'm not a fan of thoughtless adoption of something just because it a) sounds good and b) is shiny and new.

Sorry, I fat-fingered on the downvote button with my iDevice, I meant to vote you up (because of the first paragraph specifically, not so much the rest).

Could someone counteract me, please?

Done.... Just you make a little sport in my stead and get a thinner thumb will you?

Just kidding.

Thanks!

Maybe I'll consider thumb-thinning surgery instead ;)

Sounds unnatural.

That's a nice way to get at least a few upvotes for them, since I doubt you'll get just one taker.

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