One of the arguments I often hear from the pro-woo crowd to promote practices such as acupuncture or homeopathy or even keeping prayer in public schools is "people have being been doing it for hundreds of years so it must be right!" This is a fallacy known as the "appeal to tradition/antiquity" which basically says that if it's old, it's gold. Not so. And I intend to prove precisely how much it's not so by highlighting some nonsensical medical practices us silly humans thought were a good idea once upon a time. Any idea can be a bad idea, whether it's a new one or an old one. How long it's been around has no bearing on it's factual or scientific merit. Most of the ideas I'll be writing about failed miserably but some brought us enlightenment in a way that only failure can bring. But the point is that we figured out that the way things were being done was wrong and we changed it. Sadly, some ideas would take much death and time to figu...
Random thoughts on all things woo.