[sorcerer-mar]

No... Normal medicine is whatever we know works. It is unfathomably hard to figure out whether something works, ergo it is very specific knowledge (specific isolated compounds in specific amounts).

> well it's something, isn't it?

It's probably not!

If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.

[rtpg]

Fair enough, I can agree with the idea that you draw the line at "knowledge, gotten in the 'correct' way" as the categorization strategy.

In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.

[sorcerer-mar]

No no, my point is that it's unbelievably hard to know things. The reason we do unfathomably expensive clinical trials is because that's what's required to isolate signal from noise in a biological system. The reason they fail so frequently is because we're wrong most of the time we try it.

It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false.

It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.