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Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?

There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.

Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.

Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.

Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to start smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.

Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.

Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”

Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.

The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”

Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?

Thank you, have a nice day.

BellyPurpledGerbil ,

The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.

But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:

  1. Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
  2. Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.

It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.

TheFonz ,

Dude. Just take a stroll along X (Twitter) or YouTube comments.

Sooooooo many bots linked to profiles with Ai generated images talking to each other. It’s wild.

xylogx ,

Many scientific hypotheses started out as what seemed like crazy ideas at the time. When Galileo and Newton challenged the ideas of Aristotle, this was seen as fringe and radical. When Einstein challenged the accepted Newtonian dogma it was seen as scientific heresy at first. These ideas only seem mainstream to us with hindsight.

Lemmeenym ,

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Planck’s Principal

wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle

troed ,
@troed@fedia.io avatar

Bacteria being the cause of ulcers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori

wildncrazyguy138 ,

There’s a recent one I heard on radiolab podcast. In Chinese medicine there’s this concept of Chi that ebbs and flows throughout all of our body and our organs.

Western science dismissed it for a long time, but we were dumbfounded when a cancer would start somewhere, say the liver and then suddenly start appearing elsewhere like the brain, without harming anything in between.

Well, it turns out, our cell drying process for preparing slides for examination was crushing this tiny little matrix of tubes… that connects everything together. It’s working its way through the scientific process to be considered a new organ.

randomsnark ,

I was curious to learn more about this, because it sounded interesting, so I googled it. I’m guessing you’re talking about the interstitium? There’s a lot of criticism of that episode for inaccuracies about the interstitium (known for much longer than the 5 years the episode claims - it’s been mainstream since at least the 80s), traditional Chinese medicine (the treatments they mention have been proven to be no more effective than a placebo) and the connection between the two (there’s no relation between the interstitium and the lines predicted by chi). Everyone in the discussions I found sounded pretty disappointed in the episode.

Even if it’s usually pretty accurate (I don’t actually know whether it is), radiolab is not the same thing as the scientific establishment, and this is probably why the OP asked if anyone who does science for a living rather than reading pop science articles could reply.

nvermind ,

A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.

idiomaddict ,

Epigenetics vindicates a small portion of the theory behind Lamarckism, though there’s still a lot of research to be done to understand the actual mechanisms underlying it

The25002 ,

I’ll go with… Probably not a good idea to ingest radium.

Got_Bent , (edited )

You’ve led me to quite a Christian Scientist rabbit hole, but I cannot for the life of me find the requirement to start smoking. Rereading, is that maybe a typo that should’ve said they required people to stop smoking? I can’t find that either, but it seems to make more sense to me.

NounsAndWords ,

You can’t stop smoking until you start smoking…

The25002 ,

Kind of a reverse Uno on your question, but I thought it was interesting while Nazism came to prominence, some scientists were like hey I’m just as racist and anti-semitic as you, but this race stuff you’re doing isn’t very scientific. They were dismissed as quacks. Later after doing horrible experiments, nazi scientists were frustrated that their findings weren’t adding up to their ideology.

Eheran ,

Quantum Mechanics: The early concepts of quantum mechanics, such as quantized energy levels and wave-particle duality, were initially met with resistance, even by scientists like Albert Einstein, who helped develop them.

Reason for Rejection: The ideas were counterintuitive and challenged classical physics’ deterministic view, introducing probabilistic interpretations of nature.

Adoption: The overwhelming experimental evidence, such as the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, and the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, eventually led to the acceptance of quantum mechanics as a fundamental framework in physics.

Successful_Try543 ,

For us today it may be surprising, but in 1922, Einstein was not awarded for the Relativity theories (SRT 1905, ART 1915) with the Physics Nobel prise 1921, but for his theory on the explanation of the photoelectric effect (1905), as the theory of relativity was still controversially discussed.

ImplyingImplications ,

Schrödinger’s cat was also meant as a rejection of quantum mechanics. Something cannot be both a wave and a partical until observed the same way a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed. However, it does seem like quantum superposition is a reality, making the thought experiment even more bizarre.

palordrolap ,

Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.

The25002 ,

Gah, I was going to say plate tectonics.

catloaf ,

So the answer is “most things”.

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