# lost cures and med. misunderstanding



## Ernest Nagel (Mar 10, 2010)

This article is probably a little long and tedious for many but it illustrates some interesting processes in medical thinking and practices. I realize a lot of this example happened well over a hundred years ago but it's more about the mindset I think and how much information there is to manage.

http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

This was one of my favorite and one of the more readily relevant excerpts from near the end. 

"Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?"


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