[reducesuffering]

That's quite circumstantial evidence though. Nothing in that story tells me you've accurately concluded that it was the green tea.

Patient had unknown liver failure and drank a ton of green tea. Liver failure went away while still drinking tons of lower quality stuff. He proceeded to limit high quality green tea without it coming back, but if it was unrelated it wouldn't have come back regardless if he limited green tea or not.

[Cass]

Oh, and I phrased that badly, but he didn't drink a ton of tea at the hospital. The hot water for tea comes in limited amounts from those samovar type things, and he didn't want to use too much of it, so he only drank 2-3 cups per day.

We were all burningly curious whether the liver failure would come back if he resumed his normal green tea consumption, especially him (very "try everything, you only live once" type of personality; see also, consumption of mysterious Peruvian rain forest drugs), thus proving whether the tea was the culprit or not, but for ethical reasons I had to caution him against experimenting on the only liver he had, and he reluctantly agreed he wasn't THAT curious. Therefore, the cause of his liver failure will never be fully and conclusively proven to be green tea.

[Cass]

Oh, certainly, there's nothing to prove it was the green tea. We did rule out any other cause of liver failure we possibly could, but there's nothing to say we didn't miss something. But green tea in high doses IS a known cause of liver failure (admittedly, not known to us at the time, but there's case studies on pubmed I found once I started searching), so it remained the most likely cause after eliminating anything else plausible apart from the good old doctor standby of "sometimes shit just happens, shrug emoji" also known as "idiopathic."