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Originally Posted by classicman
I reckon that ole practice of drillin into yer head to relieve a headachey wern't not none too wise neever, but hey its natural riggghhhttt.
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Once again,
trepanning does have a legitimate medical use. There was a news article just recently about how it saved a little girl's life when she had pressure building up in her skull from a brain hemmorhage after getting hit in the head with a baseball in her backyard. Her only symptom was a severe headache. (It was news because the parents only bothered to take her to the ER after they saw a news program about Natasha Richardson. Had they let the girl just go to bed with some Tylenol, she would have died.)
You have to have a certain baseline of respect for the empirical evidence that any group of people collects, even if no one knows or remembers the
why behind it. There was, for example, a tribe in Africa which became quite worshipped by the locals for awhile, because they had discovered a magical shamanistic cure for disease. Anthropologists visited, and watched the entire ritual, which involved hours of dancing, chanting, taking certain sacred fruits from special trees, praying over them, hoisting the fruit in a basket over a sacred river, spending another full week or two dancing, singing, etc. etc. etc... then the gods had "blessed" the sacred fruit, the sick person ate it, and they got better. Well of course what the anthropologists realized was the fruit got moldy while it sat out there for two weeks, and the tribe was growing freaking penecillin right there in the basket. Their belief in why it worked was misguided, but the fact remained that this tribe
had discovered a cure for these sick people after all. They were not lying, they were not imagining the results. They could have saved a lot of time and energy if they had used the scientific method to further pinpoint the results they were seeing, but they were nonetheless producing results.