That was a cultural ritual, not scientific research. What scientific basis is there for Christmas or Thanksgiving?

Christmas, well winter solstice. Day or two off, but the timing works too well. Of course it was co-opted by christians. But celebrating shortest and longest day of the year are not bad picks. Specially when there isn't that much work at those times.

It's a healing ritual as per the article, it either works more than random chance or it doesn't

I've seen an estimate that it was only about 1920 that Western medical intervention had a positive effect on average. In other words, you would generally end up worse off by visiting the doctor before then. And yet medical treatment clearly carried on as a continuous tradition throughout all of history.

Besides being dirty I imagine how people thought of “healthcare” was very different. In that most people didn’t see a doctor until things were bad so they’re naturally worse afterwards. “Preventative medicine” is a recent idea.

Eh. Predecessors to toothpaste have been around for _7000 years_. At _least_.

> Since 5000 BC, the Egyptians made a tooth powder, which consisted of powdered ashes of ox hooves, myrrh, powdered and burnt eggshells, and pumice.

(Obviously, there have been improvements since.)

But seriously, preventative medicine, in _some_ form, has been around for a while. It mostly didn't work very well or at all, but the idea of doing stuff to avoid becoming sick/getting sicker isn't new.

Old forms of toothpaste and tooth powder and similar did actually work, to some extent. See the one described above; it’s basically an abrasive. Of course it worked. Toothpaste only _really_ advanced far past that in the 1950s with fluoridation.

Various other things worked to some extent. The key difference is that no-one was really trying to _demonstrate_ that they worked; that really only came with evidence-based medicine in the late 19th century.

Now now we aren’t allowed to assert that our culture is better or worse than any other, that is an inviolable cardinal sin for our pristine progressive rationalist minds. We have all of modern pharmacology and they have tiny sticks poked into burning animals in the fireplace. Different healing rituals for different folks.

Considering what a huge percentage of modern US health ailments are self inflicted through lifestyle, it's hard to imagine future generations wouldn't look at our cars and our big macs with the same patronizing quaint view as we would healing with burning sticks.

The modern person who sticks to a healthy lifestyle while still having modern medicine for emergencies and misfortunes will surely live better than just about anyone in the past, but, that person is not the actual average. The average person nowadays has their health dragged down by modern lifestyle problems so much, that I'm not sure if they're better off than someone in the past[1], even with modern medicine

[1]: Cherry picking a pretty recent past, though. For example, the obesity epidemic was way less in full swing in 1970, but we already had modern sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines by then, which eliminated the lions' share of illness. Once you go back before vaccines, it's a mixed bag. Still hard to say though, the diabetes epidemic is getting almost as bad as polio once was and trend lines keep pointing upwards.

You’re still cherry picking, though.

Leukemia and certain cancers were often a death sentence as recently as 1990. Now the survival rate over five years is like 65%+

You can cherry pick a lot of data, but in general the trend line of lifespan and health outcomes has improved the modern average person’s life significantly.

The average person also was pretty likely to die in a motor vehicle accident in 1970, so much so that in CDC reports would just name the accident section “Motor Vehicle Accidents”

I don’t disagree that the public health response to things like obesity are mostly societal issues and lifestyle induced, nor a major problem, but I would still rather live today with unfettered access to knowledge on how to even approach these health issues, than live in the past.

They survived 12000 years doing something that did not in fact heal anybody.

That's my point. Maybe actually healing is a detriment in the long run. Especially as technology progresses. Who knows.

Human populations can survive just fine with low/minimal growth and average life expectancy of 30 or so for thousands of years, just like all other animal species, we aren’t that different after all.. You don’t need basically any access to medical treatments for that.

Scientific method alone can be as good as cargo culting stick positioning for 12000 years, once you remove from the equation the underlying philosophy and curiosity that provide interesting hypotheses to test.

The output of science has been quite effective in warming up the planet, and at creating ever better technology for killing each other, also without much questioning (of science's contribution to such things, or the wisdom of our culture using it as guidance for our actions and beliefs in the proportion we do, or what we might have accomplished if we'd invested more in other disciplines). And, science achieved this in only a couple hundred years!