Tomato Effect

The tomato effect is the rejection of a medical treatment that is actually effective because it conflicts with the prevailing theoretical understanding of a disease, a pattern named by the physician James S. Goodwin in a 1984 article in JAMA after the historical case of the tomato itself, a food eaten as a staple in Europe by the 1560s but avoided in North America as supposedly poisonous until the 1820s. Goodwin distinguished the tomato effect from a later medical reversal, in which new evidence shows an established practice was genuinely mistaken or harmful; the tomato effect specifically describes a treatment that works being set aside because it does not fit the theory doctors already hold. His article cites historical parallels including willow bark extract, later commercialized as aspirin, which was overlooked for pain and fever relief for years, and lemon juice as a treatment for scurvy, established as effective in 1753 but dismissed by much of the medical profession for decades because it conflicted with the prevailing humoral theory of disease.