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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.

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”.

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.

Holli25 ,

Our professor in quantum chemistry always told the story, that no one believed in it in the beginning and wanted to disprove it. This lead to one of the best tested hypotheses in the field that it is today.

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.

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…

SelfHigh5 ,

Same. All it made me think of was that show The Leftovers (I think??) where you just see clumps of people staring at other characters while dressed all in white and chain-smoking.

The25002 ,

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

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

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.

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.

troed ,
@troed@fedia.io avatar

Bacteria being the cause of ulcers.

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

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

Telorand ,

A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.

So, not really accurate. Throw it on the pile with horseshoe theory.

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.

Chozo ,

This is the first I'm hearing of antisemitism being at all related. Where did this come from?

huginn ,

Secret ruling elites is a dog whistle - it’s Nazi cabalistic rhetoric. See also Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a Nazi propaganda piece.

Chozo ,

Okay but what does that have to do with dead internet theory? Last I saw, it just suggests that internet comments are largely bot-generated.

fishos ,
@fishos@lemmy.world avatar

OP is inadvertantly providing another example: the phrase “conspiracy theory”. It was coined by the US government as a way to discredit ideas - to make people look like crackpots. Lots of negative propaganda was created around that phrase.

Fast forward to today and “conspiracy theory”, though admittedly still tainted in various ways, has made a resurgence. Things that would have gotten you laughed out of the room are now proven fact(like Iran-Contra, for a simple and fairly uncontroversial example).

ChicoSuave ,

Continental drift was a theory formed in 1912 by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener. Geologists balked at the idea of enormous landmasses moving and said the idea of an Urkonintent was ridiculous. And besides, he was a weatherman, German weatherman, so outside of his field and untrustworthy as a German was considered at the outbreak of WW1.

Then, 50 or so years later his theory was rediscovered when different fields were trying to understand polar magnetic drift evident in iron ore formation. The only explanation that made sense from the evidence is that mountains were not permanent and oceans didn’t exist in some areas - a lot like the land masses moved.

Wegener was eventually vindicated in almost all areas except drift speed. There was an Urkonintent, which has been named Pangaea. The continents do move but because they sit upon plates. He had taught the world about the world but died before anyone thought he was right.

phdepressed ,

I think an interesting one (that is still controversial) is that megakaryocytes(MKs) in the lung actually produce a significant amount of the platelets in your body. Rather than platelets all coming from bone marrow MKs. It is interesting because these two different platelet origins have different responses to infection.

Artyom ,

A lot of mathematicians made fun of imaginary numbers when they were first proposed. In fact, the name “imaginary numbers” was actually given by skeptics to make fun of it. It kinda makes sense, imaginary numbers are all based off of w couple fairly strange assumptions, but they make otherwise difficult problems solvable.

The whole thing kinda ruined math though. Nowadays, mathematicians spend their entire careers building frameworks based on silly assumptions in the hopes that one day it’ll be useful.

FarraigePlaisteach ,
@FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world avatar

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was originally dismissed by a lot of community doctors as well as more academic medical people. There are still a few who don’t believe in it and dismiss it as a behavioural or attitude problem. Thankfully those people are in the minority now. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they’re not in influential positions.

One surprising contributor to validating ME/CFS is long covid, which seems to be the same condition but catalysed by a different virus.

I’m not a medical expert and could have mistakes in the above post but it’s generally correct.

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