At 9:30 a.m., another bloodletting of 18 ounces was performed followed by a similar withdrawal at 11 a.m. At noon, an enema was administered.
or
Dr. Craik ordered another bleeding. This time, 32 ounces were removed
i wonder how much lifespan this measures did take off of him, in this particular instance maybe hours, days, or even some weeks (of course it could have also been the primary cause of death). but all this bollocks throughout a lifespan could well be measured in whole lost years.
of course, i have no idea if this is true or not, it may also be that this kind of measures, if a body is just healthy enough, have no impact at all in the long run.
A weird case of having too much money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit...) since cutting edge medicine he could afford at that time would be quackery today? The blistering agents applied in his throat and externally seem pretty painful, one today on my hand or foot is quite a hassle, on top of the bloodletting weakening a person. The 40% blood on his deathbed sounds incredible in hindsight but there are a few people who regularly give blood today as often as is permitted every couple of months without apparent ill effects.
An adult male has around 5 liters of blood, when you donate blood they're withdrawing at most around 500 ml, so 10%. There's a huge difference in the health effects of losing 10% and 40% of your blood.
it might not be as painful as it sounds. i lost a large amount of blood once (to the point of browning out), and it basically feels like being really, really drunk. you don't really understand what's happening and you're pretty numb to things like pain.
Washington had hundreds of slaves, yet he sent his family and political allies repeatedly against the single escapee, Ona Judge in Portsmouth, NH. The governor of New Hampshire surely regretted his involvement of his daughter. That was quite a story.
It bothers me about him. I think of the three-fifths compromise (which most people around me are astonished to grasp), and the lives of the founders make me cringe.
Yes, I was angry when I learned about that in junior high or high school and the teachers usually wave that off with something like it was common back then, but there were plenty of others who did not have slaves.
Glad for modern medicine. For all the troublesome aspects of distribution and administration, it is better than nothing, and better now than it was hundereds of years ago.
At least we know our established treatments generally do actually improve outcomes rather than worsen them. Establishing that as a criteria for adopting a new treatment was a real step forward.
It's not that the principle of peer review is wrong, it's just very hard to apply it fairly and objectively when money - huge sums of money - are involved.
You do not think that established medical treatments generally improve outcomes?
What do you do if you think you have a medical problem? Where do you go for help? Obviously there are mistakes made and some unnecessary or counterproductive treatments are given in some cases. We’re talking about a massive endeavour involving millions of practitioners across the world. But claiming that in general this activity is not beneficial seems a big claim to make based on a single article on an issue with seemingly specific scope.
>You do not think that established medical treatments generally improve outcomes?
That's not what the linked article claims. The linked article claims that there are specific procedures that do not help in specific situations, yet these procedures continue to be done in those situations.
This is totally compatible with the claim that medical care improves outcomes on average.
If you want to justify the claim, "future generations will look at modern medical procedure X and remark at how primitive and pointless X is," you don't need to show that all medical procedures are bunk.
Indeed, in Washington's time, not all medical procedures were bunk. Doctors helped people, sometimes. If doctors in Washinton's time never helped people, the average person would notice that, and stop calling for a doctor. Were some of those procedures harmful to patients? Sure, but not obviously so.
I was disagreeing with the idea that established treatments today are known to improve outcomes. It is very mixed, and really depends on what problem you are trying to solve. There has been a lot of progress in some areas, but there is also a lot of bad science out there, together with institutional, legal, and regulatory corruption, on top of plenty of plain old incomplete understanding of complex hard problems and the associated necessary accidental causing of harm in ignorance while doing the best we can. We do a lot of good. We have made some miraculous advances. But we also still treat some very common problems with methods known to cause harm. The way we treat type 2 diabetes, heart disease prevention, chronic high blood pressure and mental health are particularly suspect, and these are very common and widespread problems. And I don't call those out because I have read an article or done a survey of medicine - I call them out because as problems I have personally had, I have taken the time to learn about them and found the standard approaches to be shockingly poorly evidence based. I do not know enough to make a claim about the average case, but I do know that the reliability of the medical system in dealing with the particular problems I've had in the last decade or so has been surprisingly bad and dangerous. I've come through it okay, but I've also been given way more useless or harmful advice than I would have expected, and dodged way more bullets than I would have believed were out there.
The article I posted is the tip of the iceberg. A commonly recommended, unnecessary procedure, which kills or seriously injures one in fifty is a horrible scandal. Hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from errors in hospitals, a risk one avoids by staying home, is an awful scandal. Drugs prescribed long term to improve mental health issues based on short trials, now suspected to make them worse and induce dependence, are a terrifying prospect. Diabetes treatment protocols now absolutely known to kill people, in use for decades and probably still in use in plenty of cases. Suppression of dissent. Suppression of competition. Corrupt and motivated research.
I'm not saying don't go to the doctor. You should for a lot of things. I certainly do. I'm not saying doctors don't help - for a new issue I know nothing about, I'd generally expect them to be able to. But it is certainly true that if you exercise blind faith in the system, it is perfectly capable of cheerfully killing you. The best advice I have, and it is not very good advice, is to read absolutely everything. Review the basic science yourself for and serious condition you are dealing with, commit to no serious and life changing treatments without plenty of research and multiple opinions, DON'T TRUST THE STANDARD RECOMMENDATIONS TO BE SOLUD WITHOUT REVIEWING THE BASIC SCIENCE, and avoid unnecessary hospital trips and medication as much as possible. It is easy to scoff at the doctors of Washington's day - look at all the unnecessary and harmful crap they did! At least things are better now! Well... yes, a lot of things are better now, but we still do plenty of unnecessary and harmful crap.
Between the emergence of resistant bacterial strains and growing understanding of internal microbiomes, the future will not look kindly on our use of antibiotics. And of course, you don't need to go into the future to find people who look dimly on the state of the art in nutrition.
While overprescription of antibiotics to human patients has been a problem, I think that the antibiotics usage that the future will really look back on unkindly is the massive use of antibiotics in the livestock industry. Wastewater from that is a major contribution to bacterial resistance.
You don't even have to go into the future to find unkind looks here. Operators making the decision to use ABX the way they're used in livestock are morally guilty of negligent homicide whether or not it meets a legal standard. It's unconscionable at this point to treat them as just another industrial input.
A family friend, who's a farmer, made the decision not to use antibiotics in feed.
He then went bankrupt. He claims that was why.
Whether or not it is, in his specific case, this is a coordination problem. Using antibiotics this way has to be outlawed, because any farmer who unilaterally chooses not to use it is leaving money on the table. In an efficient market, that leads to bankruptcy.
> the future will not look kindly on our use of antibiotics
It's entirely likely that we use too many antibiotics, but antibiotics have also saved all of us from unbelievable levels of pain and suffering.
I had an ear infection once, and the pain was unbearable. I went to the doctor, who quipped, "if we leave it alone, eventually it'll just burst the eardrum and drain out." And then she prescribed me some antibiotics. And that's not even the worst situation that calls for antibiotics. It's not like my life was in danger.
I believe the parent was thinking of our using antibiotics for things like increasing growth rates in livestock, hand soap marketing, and viral infections; but maybe your incredibly uncharitable interpretation is correct ...
Sure, those specific cases are justified. A lot of others aren't. I guess in the context of blood-letting it wasn't clear I meant they would look unkindly on our policy as a whole, rather than on using them at all.
That’s a bit like saying it’s barbaric that in the 18th century doctors never ever sent blood off to be tested (or looked at under a microscope).
We can’t really expect doctors to do things that aren’t really very possible (yes dna sequencing is somewhat possible today but the results aren’t necessarily very useful and far too little is known about the interaction of different genes with each other and medicine for it to be useful)
Otto Warburg figured out a lot about cancer. Unfortunately he was a jew in Nazi Germany, and his insights were mostly forgotten when the “bad genes” theory of cancer took hold of the medical profession. There was a semi-recent NY Times article about the resurgence of Warburg’s metabolic theory of cancer.
Works short term but wrecks your immune system long term, which means you will get sick from something else and no one can be blamed. Have you actually seen someone on chemo? Scientifically sound is not the first thing that comes into my mind. There's even a decent amount of objective research out there these days showing exactly this so there are really no excuses for clinging to these delusions any more.
This story makes me happy that we have modern medicine. But I am reminded that not too long ago we used to do lobotomies on the regular. So I still take most medical advice with a grain of salt....
"We" imprison people for decades ... because they got "diagnosed" with ADD, a psychological condition for which there is not even consensus that it exists, never mind how to correctly diagnose it.
Not that the lack of diagnosis procedure really matters : the diagnosis is usually carried out by completely unqualified personnel. (specifically preschool teachers make the diagnosis, and the odds that these children ever see a real psychologist is 50% at best)
(I mean any cursory study of the child services system in Norway will quickly yield the insight that the real problem is racism in child services itself, and not ADD/ADHD or any other mental disorders, but we're supposed to believe that the people involved are at least acting in good faith for some reason. Even if they're raging racists having children of immigrants abducted, apparently)
Mental health care ... has the same problem (whilst I'm sure the details are different in the US, please do remember: getting any kind of help at all, for any reason, from state health care, legally speaking is a totally unacceptable risk. You just cannot control what happens and you have no recourse. Stay away, and immediately respond VERY strongly on any whiff of attention to your kids). In Norway any competent lawyer should advise you that you can NEVER give your real name to any psychiatrist. It is a totally unacceptable risk.
(Decades ? Yes, decades: from 2-3-4 years old up to 25 years old. Imprison ? Yep, imprison)
There are way worse things that you could experience which is present even today (psycological things especially). This doesn't sound too bad actually.
We should put things in perspective. Nowadays doctors still treat diseases by cutting off bits out of the patient, and dentists still employ medieval procedures.
Because they’re able to detect issues before they get that bad, all my natural teeth are in place. I come in, they scan my teeth, drill out a tiny amount of decay before it turns into something that requires a tooth to be removed, and precisely mill a filling instead of hammering and drilling away my teeth to fill it with some lead alloy like the days of old. Anyone doing that is stuck in decades old practices.
I understand where you’re trying to go with your comment. It’s simply not the case that we’re being given bottles of gin while the dentist pulls out a hammer and chisel.
I just went in and had part of my tooth replaced because part of it crushed (I have very bad teeth). I felt zero pain. My heart rate remained under 60 the whole time. It was quick and easy.
Good Dentists are not mad scientists out to destroy you for financial gain.
They might not use lead fillings, but they still use mercury amalgam unless you tell them not to. Filling your mouth with Mercury seems pretty medieval even though there are good reasons for it (the mercury amalgam has far better mechanical properties than the plastic that replaces it).
> drill out a tiny amount of decay before it turns into something that requires a tooth to be removed,
So, drilling cavities and pulling out teeth. Those are the standard treatments that were performed in medieval times. Where exactly do you see any ground to disagree with this fact?
If your dentist does not have the option of using local anesthesia, to pick just one of a great many things not available to a medieval tooth-puller, you might want to consider switching to another practitioner.
People get killed by quackery even today and we don't generally put people in jail.
Steve Jobs cancer for example was possibly a result of his mostly fruit diet and when he got cancer instead of a traditional treatment he doubled down on the fruit quackery and other new age bullshit. He died.
Cancer from fruit? This is the first I've heard of that. I can't google for it either, because there are pages and pages of links about fruit preventing cancer.
"The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."
This is part of the scorched earth tactics that resulted in not only the death of millions of natives but the almost extinction of the American Bison, an importance source of food and clothing for many tribes.
> "The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."
There is far worse if you dig further into the history of george washington and his father/grandfather in regards to the native americans.
> This is part of the scorched earth tactics that resulted in not only the death of millions of natives but the almost extinction of the American Bison, an importance source of food and clothing for many tribes.
"Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone"
It is no secret that the architects of nazi germany admired the genocide of the native americans and modeled themselves after the US. And yet, we are in such denial about our role in the death of natives. ( It was "smallpox" ).
"termed a "war of extermination" by Governor Peter Burnett who declared warfare would not cease with Native Americans "until the Indian race becomes extinct""
> And yet, we are in such denial about our role in the death of natives. ( It was "smallpox" )
You make a good point but you're also wrong.
The way the colonies (and later United States) treated the natives was absolutely deplorable and immoral. The US (from the founding fathers until very recent times) is as guilty as you say.
HOWEVER... it cannot be denied that the accidental spread of European diseases wiped out over 50% of all natives before the era of colonization even began. Even today if contact is made with isolated peoples great care must be taken and medical services kept on stand-by. A disease ravaging the isolated group is a very, very real possibility.
It also means if humanity does every colonize another planet (even in our own solar system), if the flow of people ever stops we may not be able to re-establish it due to disease risk.
For that you would need an animal that breeds in captivity, reaches maturity quickly, eats inexpensive food (not meat), with good temperament, and that can be handled in a farming environment (not as agile as deer or as strong as a bison).
In the Americas, the only animal that responds to that description are llamas, guinea pigs, capybaras, etc. None of them found in North America.
> It is no secret that the architects of nazi germany admired the genocide of the native americans
Nazi Germany borrowed tactics from American ethnic cleansing initiatives, but simultaneously they entertained the idea of having Native Americans as allies in the event of an American invasion.
The German film "Der Kaiser von Kalifornien" portrayed Native Americans in a positive light.
All things should judged within their specific context lest history forget Martin Luther King Jr for unthinkable crime of roasting living creatures and feeding them to his young children.
It’s hard to compare the example of George Washington with the bizarre apparently hypothetical example you provided, but what about the treatment of Native Americans by European immigrants would have been judged differently then than now? I’m confident that a huge portion of people at that time would have made the same judgments as we do now, although I would admittedly need to research it further.
For the more common example of slavery of Africans in the United States, the argument that “they can’t be judged by current standards” doesn’t hold water, since many prominent people at that time wrote obviously ludicrous attempts to justify their actions, which means they clearly had the moral intuition that their actions required justification. Not to mention the fact that there were prominent abolitionists at the time.
Clearly there was nothing unique about “that time” that made it impossible to decide whether slavery was good or bad. I’m generally very skeptical of the idea that historical people deserve a pass for major moral issues (particularly ones that clearly involve direct violence against humans).
Sun Tzu lived thousands of years before Washington, yet he was more civilized.
A true general would not need to conduct a war of attrition with scorched-earth tactics against tribes in the bronze age.
Not only Natives had inferior weaponry, they also were not familiar with writing, mapmaking and did not having navigation tools like the compass... limiting any form of military planning.
Washington had a wide spectrum of options and he chose to be immoral.
The native people warred like everyone else. That does not forgive the wide scale genocide the white people committed. They wouldn't have been a "warring nation on America's doorstep" without previous wars against them, so that's hardly a fair justification for more war.
Native Americans are not one nation, but many unique nations. These nations were, in many cases, not united under a single leadership, and their leadership was sometimes matriarchal.
Diplomacy with one group would not always extend to other groups, and in some cases diplomacy was conducted with the wrong individual, especially when tribes were matriarchal.
These situations made settlers confused and make them wrongly think that diplomacy was futile, as you seem to wrongly suggest.
or
Dr. Craik ordered another bleeding. This time, 32 ounces were removed
i wonder how much lifespan this measures did take off of him, in this particular instance maybe hours, days, or even some weeks (of course it could have also been the primary cause of death). but all this bollocks throughout a lifespan could well be measured in whole lost years.
of course, i have no idea if this is true or not, it may also be that this kind of measures, if a body is just healthy enough, have no impact at all in the long run.