Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2016 February 16

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February 16

Lipophilic substances

Are there any substances or objects I could buy that absorb or absorb oil like a sponge? Preferably one that works on butter, too? If it's a powder like activated charcoal it would have to not damage vacuum cleaners.

I'm tired of having to press down on the floor very hard with paper towels and rub very fast and it still takes forever to get the last few microns or nanometers off (or however little c is needed to make it stop being reflective at glancing angles). It takes far less time to soak up hydrophilic things like diet soda completely. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I believe the usual technique for cleaning up oily spills is first to remove all you can mechanically (with a paper towel, for example, or by mixing with saw dust and shoveling large spills), then to use a detergent and some water to dissolve the rest. At that point it can be sucked up by a sponge just like water alone. StuRat (talk) 03:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I hadn't thought of that because I don't use sponges. They seem disgusting. It seems less painful than trying to get soap off your floor without a sponge, though. I wonder if a wet/dry shop vacuum can be powerful enough to remove oil sheens? (but probably only worth buying one if you're going to be doing a lot of carpentry or ostrich egg juggling) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:40, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Nope, a vacuum cleaner won't remove an oil sheen from the floor. StuRat (talk) 02:32, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

In a garage, use ash or sawdust to shovel it. Aware of fire, explosive gas mixtures and damage to the floor to use brake cleaner. Some kitchen cleaner can help as well and less dangerous and hazardous. Operating vacuum cleaners ignites explosive mixures immediately with the motor brushes and power switches! Industrial vacuum cleaners are not protected by default. Oil can thighten the filter of the vacuum cleaner and cause a problem on the motor brushes. Some kitchen cleaner are based on acid, useful for some substances, some use tensides. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 16:22, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Oil-absorbent mat are available in motor factors, hardware shops, etc. LongHairedFop (talk) 20:04, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

People shutting down ("dying") and then starting up again ("coming back to life")

Computers that are being restarted usually shut down and then start up again. There is evidence of people doing this too. There have been several incidents where people shut down (or should I say "death") but then start up again (or should I say "come back to life"), which means that people have that capability (if they didn't have this capability, then we wouldn't have these incidents, but we do have them). For example, there was a "dead" baby boy who was put in the morgue freezer, but he was found to be crying when he was taken out of the freezer the next day for cremation. If people can start up again, why has about 99% (I think) of every human who has "died" not "come back to life"? I mean, that baby boy and several other people did, and they're human too. Why is this? VRtrooper (talk) 08:02, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Occam's razor would dictate that those people only appeared to be dead (we don't have to imagine that people can mistakenly think someone is dead), rather than there being some mysterious force that keeps people dead. Ian.thomson (talk) 08:17, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Not just Occam's razor, simple fact. They weren't dead. People don't come back from the dead. Fgf10 (talk) 11:40, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Several religions seem to have different opinions ;-). But more seriously, there are different definitions of death. People do recover from clinical death, though I'm not aware of any case where that has happened without outside (and usually very qualified medical) intervention. And on the other hand, even braindead bodies can be kept "clinically alive" for a while, e.g. to enable organ transplants. BYW, I was quite blown away by Shelly Kagan's Philosophy 176 Open Yale Course. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Real death is brain death. As long as the brain is recoverable, it's not death. But I do agree with your point, and this is frequently the cause for media confusion. As far as what religions believe, I couldn't care less, and it is not relevant here. Fgf10 (talk) 12:41, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

"Real death is brain death" - a bit of No true Scotsman, eh? Also I think you're probably right but I don't see any way that I can verify your claims. I don't suppose you have any references to share on the reference desk? SemanticMantis (talk) 14:27, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

It's a self-evident fact. I don't see how it can't be true? Fgf10 (talk) 14:31, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but a reference desk is no place for "self-evident fact". We are here to provide references. Or at least I am, I'm not sure what you're on about ;)

Nomenclature is an important area of science after all, see e.g. scientific nomenclature. I suspect somebody has written WP:RS on the matter of what is and isn't "true" death, and perhaps we could be enlightened if you could share some sources. Below, I have included a selection of WP links that might help the OP. and illustrate some of the terminological challenges associated with death and revival. As for you and your opinions, I suggest you read up on begging the question, and consider that you may have been logically affirming the consequent.SemanticMantis (talk) 14:27, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

A person is defined by their consciousness, memories and personality. These reside in the brain. As long as the brain is intact and functioning, the person is alive. When it is not, the person ceases to exist. Easy as. Rhetorical devices or logical fallacies are irrelevant. Finding sources is difficult, as they are very frequently tainted by religious thought, as evidenced in your links below. The medical definition of death one is particularly problematic, as a) it just talks about the US, where these sorts of things are treated rather backwardly, and b) is largely about legal and ethical definitions, which are frequently only loosely based on reality. Fgf10 (talk) 15:22, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Aye, so an unconscious person is not a person? Or perhaps a person in a Persistent_vegetative_state is actually dead, if their brain is not functioning properly, and they have no personality any more? Look, this is all very interesting stuff, and I appreciate the scientific approach. But please don't act like there's no debate on these issues, even among the most atheist of scientists. An easy way to see why there might be some serious scientific debate surrounding death is that there is also debate surrounding Life#Definitions. The fact of the matter is, sometimes ethics and philosophy creep in to science, no matter how much we may wish they were separate :) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:58, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Don't be obtuse, there is no way that makes sense. Do you seriously think that if you hook up an unconscious person to an EEG, you won't see any activity? Indeed, vegetative state, if no EEG is measurable, is brain death. Vegetative state is mostly a legal construct for countries that don't have provisions for euthanasia. Don't confuse religious and legal mumbo jumbo with scientific debate. I guess most people are too sentimental to actually define death, but this is the science desk, it's just about the facts. Fgf10 (talk) 19:56, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Here is the encyclopedia entry on death from Plato, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It would be irresponsible to leave the term undefined; it is perhaps equally irresponsible to assert that all scientists agree on its definition. We could make a strong claim that biologists have the best set of definitions, but two problems arise: first, many biologists disagree on the definition - see our extensive and well-cited treatment at our article, life § definitions, and death § problems of definition; and second, biologists do not own the monopoly on our understanding of complex topics.

At the very least, use caution with any overly-broad definition; SemanticMantis has already pointed out a problem with the assertion that one is dead when one is unconscious: most humans sleep, and few of us consider that to be a state of death (but some cultures, and some particularly cloying philosophers, do!)

The original question can only be meaningfully and methodically answered if we are very careful with our terminology; and even then, we should at least keep an open mind about the very difficult, very well-studied philosophical problems that are associated with any carefully-crafted definitions. A very large number of philosophical paradoxes and conundrums famously arise when we scrutinize the mind-body problem very closely.

Nimur (talk) 16:26, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

We have articles on near death experience, medical definition of death, and even general death, note the "problems with definition" section in the last one. You might also be interested in Resuscitation, advanced life support, or even a bit of cryopreservation. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The philosophical error in this question is thinking of death as an event, in some way similar to hitting the computer's off switch. Think of death as a process, which can sometimes be stopped part way and even reversed. Our understanding of that process is still imperfect, which is why at times someone who has been considered dead terns out not to be. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.178.47 (talk) 14:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I question the OP's analogy. When a computer is shut down, do all the components shut down immediately? Or might there be capacitors and other entities which are still "alive" for a while after shutdown? And the data in disk drives and firmware remains "alive". The machine is not really "dead", it's effectively "dormant". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:45, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

That's a pretty good point. There's a reason why you're supposed to power off your cable modem for 30 seconds before rebooting it -- to make sure you've really "killed it"/shut it down fully. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:00, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree that it's not a good analogy. When a computer "shuts down", you are just removing electrical power. The hardware remains entirely intact, and any data on disk or in nonvolatile memory also remains intact. But when a person dies, metabolic processes cease and decomposition begins almost immediately, destroying the cellular machinery that makes life possible. Unlike removing power from a computer, it is an irreversible change. Various conditions can mimic death to an untrained, or even trained, observer, but after significant decomposition occurs, life cannot be resumed. Mnudelman (talk) 19:20, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

see also Sam Parnia and references there. Also old Coursera course on Resusitation Science. GangofOne (talk) 20:09, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

• Mnudelman has mentioned the relevant issue above, metabolism. As long as this continues, there is life. There are animals, like water bears, or some plant seeds, which show no obvious signs of life, yet which maintain a metabolic trajectory. Basically, life has to be defined at the cellular level. Once a cell has stopped metabolizing, it is dead. When a body has gotten to the point where its functions cannot sustain the metabolic functions of the cells of its essential tissues, it will die. Things like declaring "arrhythmia" or "brain death" the point of death, itselfare legal ones, not biological ones. μηδείς (talk) 22:33, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

There is quite a bit of room for interesting variation here. Cryptobiosis like in tardigrades for example, which is frequently aided by trehalose (I will admit I still don't understand what makes one kind of sugar so much better for being dehydrated/frozen/etc. than another). More relevant for our purposes, clinical factors like hypothermia and xenon (for the latter see [1]; it's neuroprotective). It isn't always obvious why. There is ample room for suspicion that if, somehow, we could send cells just the right kind of signals to make them fight back against dying, it might be possible to revive people we're "sure" are dead. But of course, if we knew that, they wouldn't be considered dead any more, but in a critical condition... Wnt (talk) 01:14, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Oh oh, there's also the bdelloid rotifers! They dehydrate so severely that their DNA breaks apart. Since they are obligate parthenogens, there are only females, and no meiosis is thought to have occurred in a really long time. But they still can reanimate, and in the process they are able to incorporate the DNA of their sisters through a from of horizontal gene transfer [2], leading to charming titles like Lesbian Necrophiliac Bdelloid Rotifers [3]. 14:38, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

What matters to animals like rotifers and water bears is that they still have enough potential energy so that when conditions are right they can come back on again. They are not being resurrected from the dead, they are simply resuming activity. μηδείς (talk) 19:36, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

: Boooh!!! -- Apostle (talk) 20:30, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Quantitative analysis of gases producing odors in feces of humans, animals and birds

The chemical composition of feces of humans, animals and birds could vary as a result of, (for example), changes in diet. The gases which produce the odors in such feces comprise a number of sulfides, skatole and indole. My question concerns a quantitative analysis of the proportion of each of these sulfides, skatole and indole in the gases causing the odor in the feces. Would the results of such a quantitative analysis vary with the differing chemical compositions of faces caused by, (for example), changes in diet, or would it be independent of the chemical composition of the feces? Simonschaim (talk) 12:21, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

That's careful way of asking why, how, and to what extent shit stinks, right? Very interesting stuff, and relevant to a variety of medical, social, and public safety concerns. I found a large assortment of articles via google scholar, searching various things like / [skatole/indole] fecal analysis quantitative/. I think it's fairly obvious that the quantity of gasses changes based on fecal composition. Other factors include the metabolome and gut bacteria populations. Anyway, here's a selection of freely-accessible studies that will give you some of the information that you seek, using mass spectrometry, gas chromatography, and other quantitative methods, for humans and pigs: [4] [5] [6] [7]. The last one in particular is probably a good place to start. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:52, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you SemanticMantis for you dtailed answer for which I am most grateful. Although the TOTAL concentration of the gaseous mixture which causes the odor in feces is dependent on the chemical composition of the feces, the point I am interested in is, whether the RELATIVE percentages of the various sulfides, skatole and indole in the gaseous mixture causing the odor depends on the chemical composition of the feces, or is it a CONSTANT irrespective of the chemical composition of the feces — Preceding unsigned comment added by Simonschaim (talk • contribs) 09:00, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

You're welcome. As for your follow up, here's one more article that has data [8] showing that changes in diet change the amount of at least one gas. It seems WP:OR to me that the relative concentrations must change in general -- what mechanisms would keep them constant? A good way to look in to this would be to use google scholar's "cited by" links. For example my last link above on "Malodorous Volatile Substances" has been cited 41 times, and many of those papers will have data related to your interests. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:44, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you again. Although it has been shown that a diet change can change the concentration of one gas in the feces, is it not possible that the concentration of the other gases in the feces will change in the same proportion as this one gas? Simonschaim (talk) 12:40, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

STI Testing

Given that there are so many lab tests that can test for pathogens from normal body flora, and there are many different types of pathogens, how do STI clinics track down the right species for treatment? And how long do patients have to wait for the treatment (because these bugs take time to grow) and how much are they charged for lab testing? Is it possible to just look at the outward signs and treat the diseases on the first meeting? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 14:36, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The article Sexually transmitted infection (STI) has sections about screening and diagnosis that are carried out at a Sexual health clinic. No procedure tests for all infectious agents and separate tests are done for STIs such as syphilis, trichomonas, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, hepatitis and HIV. Public governmental and non-profit clinics often provide services for free or adjust the fee based on a patient's ability to pay. AllBestFaith (talk) 18:40, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

But what about sexually transmitted infections from endemic areas that are acquired by international travel and licentious sex? Not all STIs are global. 140.254.77.141 (talk) 19:12, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Also, you still haven't answered about the time it takes to do the lab tests or whether they actually do the tests to ascertain the identity of a germ. 140.254.77.141 (talk) 19:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The answers to your questions may differ from pathogen to pathogen. HIV testing, in some cases, can be done in home kits that you buy at a pharmacy, with results available in as little as 20 mintues [9]. Chlamydia, on the other hand, requires cell culturing (which can take several days) or complex PCR techniques (which are expensive, and I am not sure about the time) [10]. Price, when testing can be performed, etc., will therefore also differ. --OuroborosCobra (talk) 19:39, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The World Health Organization provides a comprehensive fact sheet on STIs and estimates that 357 million new infections occur every year with one of 4 STIs: chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and trichomoniasis. A WHO report notes that antimicrobial resistance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae is an important public health problem. AllBestFaith (talk) 22:03, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

What sciences fields, besides psychiatry, have an "anti-" version of it?

Is the field of psychiatry all alone with its anti-psychiatric version? --Scicurious (talk) 23:36, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Psychiatry is not a science. The science, to the extent there is one, is psychology. Psychiatry is a medical discipline. --Trovatore (talk) 23:36, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Psychiatry might not be an independent science, but what science is truly independent? And I would not say that the science that studies the brain is psychology, which, actually studies the mind. --Scicurious (talk) 23:41, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The science that studies the brain is neuroscience, not psychiatry. --Trovatore (talk) 23:43, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Neurology studies the nervous system as a tissue. It's internal medicine for the brain. Psychiatry cares about how the brain generates the mind (or fails to do that).--Scicurious (talk) 23:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Your comments seem to reflect a notion of psychiatry that is completely at cross-purposes with your question. Psychiatry per se does not "care about how the brain generates the mind", though certainly individual psychiatrists may do that.

Psychiatry per se is not a science, and the anti-psychiatry movement is not necessarily against the scientific study of the concerns of psychiatry. Psychiatry is a medical discipline, aimed at treating mental illness. The anti-psychiatry movement generally rejects the "illness" model for mental states. That disagreement is not one over science at all. --Trovatore (talk) 00:05, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, I have rewritten the question to make all pedants happy.Scicurious (talk) 00:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, there is anti-politics, for example. Also anti-clericalism. These are more parallel to anti-psychiatry than would be the case if psychiatry were actually a science.

I guess I find your question somewhat hostile to anti-psychiatry, which you certainly have the right to be, but I'm not sure your hostility is based on a correct understanding of what anti-psychiatry actually is. Anti-psychiatry is not in and of itself anti-scientific. It opposes the practice of psychiatry, as it is currently practiced. --Trovatore (talk) 00:56, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I did not intend to be hostile towards anti-psychiatry. But it seems as a misnomer then. They could have called their criticism "alternative psychiatry" or "neo psychiatry."Scicurious (talk) 01:02, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, their position, as I understand it, is that psychiatry as it is currently practiced does more harm than good. That does not imply that they know an alternative that does more good than harm. If I see you trying to put out a fire with gasoline, and I advise you that that's probably not a good thing to do, that doesn't necessarily mean I know a way to put out the fire, but nevertheless, you really ought to not use the gasoline. --Trovatore (talk) 01:04, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Speaking as a cognitive scientist myself, I find it to be not in any slight way to be controversial, counter-intuitive, or atypical to classify and accord the status of a scientific discipline to psychiatry, in the same way that medicine itself is undoubtedly a science (or at the least contains an aspect we call "medical science"). It's not that psychiatry isn't a science and psychology is. Rather psychiatry is just not the same science as psychology; it is probably best described as a sub-discipline of psychology (as well as of medicine). There's a lot of different ways to chop up the block (you might just as well draw epistemological hierarchies classifying it as an offshoot or co-branch of biopscychology or neurology) but one thing I feel very confident in affirming is that there is such a thing as psychiatric science.

The above logic would exclude many disciplines, from applied mathematics to medicine, from being sciences simply because they prioritize pragmatics over theory. That's a way to divide the sciences, conceptually, but it's not an argument I typically hear from scientists for discounting fields from qualifying as science whatsoever. Those distinctions generally come down to whether the empirical/scientific process is applied in the field and in what manner -- not what the practical outcomes are. Mind you, I wouldn't necessarily object to the claim that a greater volume of empirically rigorous "hard science" research is done under the umbrella of psychology than psychiatry (at least when you are talking about direct testing of discreet phenomena rather than generalized findings drawn from large datasets of self-reports and other questionable measures), but that also is not exclusionary in itself. Snow ^{let's rap} 04:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't ordinarily consider medicine a science, either. It's more like engineering.

But in any case, the question came up in the context of anti-psychiatry, in a way that suggested that anti-psychiatry was opposition to a science. I don't think that's accurate. Anti-psychiatry holds one or more of the propositions: (i) that the practice of psychiatry is harmful, (ii) that its foundational idea of considering certain patterns of thought to be a form of illness parallel to physical illness is misconceived, (iii) that its goals are dishonest and authoritarian. None of those things is an objection to psychiatry as a science. --Trovatore (talk) 05:02, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, while I'd tend to agree that antipsychiatry isn't per se anti-scientific, the movement has traditionally had a great degree of cross-over with anti-scientific or pesudo-scientific hoopla. Further, to the extent that a person embraces the position of antipsychiatry to the broadest and most inclusive extent--that is to say, that the entire discipline of psychiatry is a fundamentally mistaken approach to the human mind--then you can certainly argue that they are rejecting a huge body of scientific research. It's like arguing that a flat earth proponent can still be technically consider themselves a student of the physical sciences if they believe in the concept of scientific proof but just disagree about the evidence relating the the physics of the world around them. I mean, yeah, in the strictest, most abstract sense, we might concede the matter, but at that point do we really have much faith that they really understand even the simpler concepts involved such that we wouldn't feel comfortable calling their ideas non-scientific. I'm not saying that anipsychiatry rises to that level, but it's definitely a field that has been piggybacked upon by those who want to attack the empirical basis of psychiatry en route to developing a much more questionable model of the mind as it applies to human health and suffering, often with a bizarre and/or spiritualist flavor. Snow ^{let's rap} 05:27, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I think what they see as a "fundamentally mistaken approach to the human mind" is mostly about the concept of "mental illness". The notion that cognitive patterns are "illnesses" does not really have any empirical content. It's more of a social construct, or a metaphor. You can certainly take the position that it's a useful metaphor, but that's not a claim on which science has any real opinion. --Trovatore (talk) 06:06, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Mental disease is classified as disease for the same reason that a pathogen or physical pathology is; if it affects the fitness of the organism such as to compromise the odds of survival (or, as we sometimes stray with regard to humans, if it interferes with our ability to thrive and derive enjoyment from life). What's more, insofar as the mind is a product of the brain (and other parts of our physiological make-up), it is at least susceptible to the consequences of well understood pathologies of that organ. To try to reject that is to embrace a kind of primitive dualism under the mistaken presumption that it represents some kind of open question of epistemology. sure, mental disease is a "concept" and a "matter of perspective", but only to the same extent physical disease, as a biological process, is, and that's not how most of us use the term. Mental aberrations, be they difficult to describe in the hard question sense, nonetheless have a basis in physical matter and are subject to empirical observation and testing, be it often by indirect measures. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:13, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, first of all, let me come out of the closet here — yes, I am a dualist. I do not think the hard problem of consciousness will ever be answered in physicalist terms. As far as I can see, any potential such answers are simple category errors. The only real physicalist response is Dennett's; he claims it just isn't a problem. But that's self-evidently false.

However. It isn't necessary to reach that question to see the point here. Just look at the central text of psychiatry, the DSM. Every time it comes out, they have to argue for political reasons about what is and what is not a mental disorder. I don't see a lot of that happening with physical illness. Some maybe, but not nearly as much.

Then they define the conditions in a "check off five of nine" kind of paradigm, from a list of symptoms.

I'm not saying the DSM is all nonsense. Could be that it's even "correct", whatever that means. But whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's not science. --Trovatore (talk) 07:26, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough; other than saying that it is basically universally rejected by most scientists who in any direct way study the mind, I don't know how to address the issue of dualism here without completely hijacking the thread into another topic area (which, in any event, we may have already accomplished between us :). But as to you're other points, I think it's worth bearing in mind that you can't judge the empirical validity of an entire scientific domain based on its most problematic researchers, methodologies, sub-disciplines, and issues. Just because one accepts some "fuzzy" initial conclusions in a given area as a place-holder until those mechanics are better worked-out doesn't mean that one is not applying an evidence-based/testable/falsifiable approach to understanding those phenomena; that's just how science works. Most of us do not have the luxury of working solely in the "pure" science of mathematics alone; most scientists, even in the hard sciences, must use conceptual work-arounds to break phenomena down to workable units. Snow ^{let's rap} 12:23, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

You're a dualist? But here you are writing about conscious experience. That's a physical effect of conscious experience. On the flip side, conscious experience is an effect of physical stimuli. What does it even mean to say that it's not physical, given that?

"Diseases" are things we try to "cure", and what we try to cure is a matter of public policy. I don't see how it could be otherwise. Some people might argue that plasmodia ought to have a right to life, or that cancers are miniature John Galts freeing themselves from the shackles of the cellular colony that oppressed them. Those attitudes simply haven't prevailed in society at large. -- BenRG (talk) 19:04, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Hmm? I didn't say that the physical and the mental were causally disconnected.

I see medicine as primarily as a service contracted by the patient. I don't see that as a "matter of public policy". --Trovatore (talk) 20:15, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps a parallel situation occurred around the time that Ignaz Semmelweiss looked into childbed fever. I think it was reasonably well known by women that going to hospitals to deliver their babies was unsafe, but conventional wisdom of the time failed to recognize the spread of the disease by doctors. Once inculcated, these attitudes proved quite resilient, and to this day some women prefer midwife delivery, natural childbirth etc. over conventional hospital delivery. Wnt (talk) 01:06, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm far from convinced the historic problems of childbed fever are significant factors in the resurgence of midwide delivery, natural childbirth etc over conventional hospital delivery in most countries. If we look at the stats, and our article Home birth has a few (Midwife doesn't seem to have many, Natural childbirth is US centric), births in hospitals with doctors seems to have continued to increase well after the the germ theory of disease, antibiotics and the rise of proper sterile technique. With this came a drastic fall in deaths during childbirth particularly in developed countries. It was only well after childbirth fever and related issues arising from doctor-hospital deliveries was no longer a problem that midwives, natural childbirth and home births began to see a resurgence. While it's possible this belated resurgence was because of deep rooted fears arising out of the problems caused by historic practices highlighted by Ignaz Semmelweiss, this doesn't seem to concur with what most people say where they talk about things like over-medicilisation. And often these rises seemed to mirror to other moves towards stuff regarded as more natural or against doctors and medical practices, e.g. the rise of alternative medicine. Developing countries are more complicated, often they are more about issues of access and so some authorities have suggested training midwives help given the difficulties ensuring everyone has access to traditional healthcare. Nil Einne (talk) 13:48, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Antirelativity. List of organizations opposing mainstream science -- GangofOne (talk) 08:24, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

• As others have said above, psychiatry is not a science, it is a science-based technology. There are "anti" movements for many other science-based technologies, for example anti-vaccination, anti-abortion, anti-gmo, anti-nuclear, and more broadly, anti-medicine, as in Christian Science. Looie496 (talk) 15:10, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Being anti-abortion is a completely different animal. Anti-abortion activists do not claim they have a better approach towards abortion. They are just against it.Llaanngg (talk) 15:29, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Anti-relativity is a thing. It was more prominent when relativity was newer and less-accepted—and in interwar Germany there was a racial/nationalist movement to reject relativity and other "Jewish physics"—but it's still around. Pretty much any physics professor will tell you about the e-mails/letters/etc. they get from cranks about their Theories of Everything that supposedly disprove that moron Einstein's nonsense. And young earth creationism is basically anti-all-science, since YEC beliefs contradict most modern scientific theories. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 23:15, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Let's not forget Anti-Wikipedia, e.g. The Anti Wikipedia Resource "Truth based on who edits last" and http www.aetherometry.com Electronic_Publications/Politics_of_Science/Antiwikipedia/awp_index.html Wikipedia: A Techno-Cult of Ignorance opps, didn't work: "Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist." Fancy that. So I had to mangle the url above. -- GangofOne (talk) 05:49, 18 February 2016 (UTC)