...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
Author Tag
...
Publisher Tag
...
Topic Tag
...
HEAL Toronto
...
AIDS Paradox
Controversy
...
| Page Properties | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||||
|
| Page Properties | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||
|
Original Publication
HEAL Toronto
...
How popular consensus and the medical establishment have often stubbornly clung to the wrong ideas.
Any medical dictionary will tell you that influenza is caused by a virus or that scurvy results from lack of vitamin C - both pieces of common knowledge. Less well known is the fact that the majority of doctors and scientists started out with the wrong ideas about these and many other diseases. It is often the case that what becomes common knowledge has first to be argued by a lone dissenting voice against huge resistance. Science is regularly reminded that Nature is oblivious to democracy. Derek Freeman, who challenged Margaret Mead on Coming of Age in Samoa, once said, " To seek to dispose of a major scientific issue by a show of hands is a striking demonstration of the way in which belief can come to dominate the thinking of scholars." The prevailing hypothesis, in the long run, is a matter of natural selection - not popular opinion.
A Brief History of Mismanaged Epidemics | ||
|---|---|---|
Disease | Popular Consensus | Actual Cause |
Scurvy | Contagious | Malnutrition: |
Beri-beri | Contagious | Malnutrition: |
Childbed Fever | Non-contagious | Contagious: |
Influenza | Bacteria | Virus |
Pellagra | Contagious | Malnutrition: |
SMON | New Virus | Iatrogenic: |
Table adapted from: What if everything you thought about AIDS was wrong?
by Christine Maggiore
...