Interesting read below about
significant medical breakthroughs that were rejected out of hand when they were first announced, but which later proved to be valid.
Cases like Semmelweis and handwashing, germs as disease agents, and even Mendel's discoveries about
heredity: ideas that were roundly mocked by the "establishment" when they first came out.
In particular, read the section in the article about
cancer immunology: "... when immunologist James Allison first suggested his research interest in T cells, his mentors discouraged him. "Tumor immunology had such a bad reputation," he told the New Yorker in 2012. "Many people thought that the immune system didn't play any role in cancer."
So even today this can be an issue.
But the medical establishment as rejector isn't all to blame here. It does have the responsibility to act as guardian, to catch and reject those ideas that are clearly quackery when they first appear, and which richly deserve the ridicule they come to receive.
This is especially true today in the age of the Internet, when all sorts of cure-claims pop up on websites everywhere and all the time, with no scientific basis at all.
A large part of the problem is that major medical, or any scientific for that matter, breakthroughs must inevitably seem "quirky" or even incredible at first. This is simply because they are the amazing, unexpected, new discoveries that have become necessary. That is, if an easy solution had been available, it would have already been found by now. It hasn't, so a more radical new solution must be sought, "thinking outside the box" as they say, and this new thing is it, despite how unlikely it may seem at first. But this often doesn't sit well with much of the mainstream medical community, used to thinking along "traditional" lines, and now uncomfortable with the prospect having to change.
So that's the fine line the medical establishment must walk: rightly rejecting the false claims of some newly proposed (wrong) thing, but then not wrongly rejecting as well a valid new thing, simply because it "seems" like it's quackery.
As a result we, and I mean we here on this forum, may often find ourselves in a curious position when reading about
a newly promised "cure," or "major advance" in cancer research or treatment: that maybe this is worthless, or maybe it really is the "big one."
We may hope to ourselves that, yes indeed, this is the find that will change everything, but only time will eventually decide that for us.
https://forum.facmedicine.com/threads/medical-breakthroughs-that-were-initially-ridiculed-or-rejected.26394/