Prairiesky retweeted
Let's talk about how long it takes the medical establishment to admit it was catastrophically wrong.
1950s: Doctors recommend smoking to pregnant women. "Calms the nerves." Magazine adverts featured obstetricians lighting up patients in waiting rooms.
Time until reversed: 25 years.
1960s: Thalidomide prescribed for morning sickness. Ten thousand children born with malformed limbs across forty-six countries. The drug was on the market for five years. The United States narrowly avoided approval thanks to one FDA reviewer, Frances Kelsey, who was harassed by the manufacturer for refusing to rubber-stamp it. She received a Presidential Medal afterwards. The men who pressured her did not lose their jobs.
Time until reversed: 5 years. 10,000 affected children.
1970s: DES prescribed to prevent miscarriage. Causes a rare vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who took it, sometimes appearing twenty years later.
Time until reversed: 30 years.
1980s: Margarine officially recommended over butter. Trans fats turn out to cause the exact heart disease they were marketed as preventing. Harvard researchers later estimated up to 250,000 excess American deaths from industrial trans fats before the FDA finally moved against them in 2018.
Time until banned: 30 years after the harm was published.
2000s: Vioxx approved for arthritis. The internal Merck documents showing cardiac risk existed before approval. They hid them.
Time until withdrawn: 5 years. 60,000 dead.
2010s: Opioids prescribed like sweets. "Less than 1% addictive when properly prescribed," cited endlessly from a 1980 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The letter was 101 words long, observed hospitalised patients on short-term doses, and was not a study. It was cited over six hundred times to justify giving OxyContin to people with back pain for the rest of their lives.
Time until reversed: 20 years and counting. Half a million dead.
The pattern is mechanical.
The establishment recommends something. The evidence of harm emerges. The establishment ignores it. Years pass. The harm becomes undeniable. The guidance is quietly updated "based on emerging data." Nobody is held responsible. Nobody apologises. The next mistake is already in development in an adjacent department.
So when modern doctors tell you, with the full confidence of the institution behind them:
"Seed oils are heart healthy."
"Statins for everyone over fifty."
"Saturated fat causes heart disease."
"Cholesterol is the enemy."
Remember that they have been catastrophically, generationally, lethally wrong before. While charging consultation fees the entire way through.
The question worth asking isn't whether they're right this time.
The question is what their track record predicts.
History gives you a fairly clear answer.
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