[glial]

Yes, I remember learning about this issue with psychiatric medications and being similarly dismayed.

There is a sub-field called Computational Psychiatry [1] trying to do better. And interestingly, a person could argue that randomized controlled trials for medicine are only really necessary because we don't have good enough theory and/or good enough measurement devices. If we did, we could reliably predict the effects of a medication without the trial.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4238