“Medicine” is itself an example of the “noncentral fallacy” you criticize: it includes great things like surgery and trauma medicine, vaccination, treatments based on actual understanding of biology like insulin, and miscellaneous drugs that are claimed to do useful things for mysterious reasons. While there are certainly effective things in that last category, like antibiotics and painkillers, the “epistemics” of the field strike me as pretty shit: if quinine were proposed as a treatment for malaria today, I expect the medical establishment to say things like “that’s tree bark juice. You are not a squirrel.”
The local flavor of quackery where I grew up was Ayurveda, and my view of the herbal remedies suggested by its practitioners is they’re no worse than what they called “allopathy”: try the thing, and if it works, it works.
“Medicine” is itself an example of the “noncentral fallacy” you criticize: it includes great things like surgery and trauma medicine, vaccination, treatments based on actual understanding of biology like insulin, and miscellaneous drugs that are claimed to do useful things for mysterious reasons. While there are certainly effective things in that last category, like antibiotics and painkillers, the “epistemics” of the field strike me as pretty shit: if quinine were proposed as a treatment for malaria today, I expect the medical establishment to say things like “that’s tree bark juice. You are not a squirrel.”
The local flavor of quackery where I grew up was Ayurveda, and my view of the herbal remedies suggested by its practitioners is they’re no worse than what they called “allopathy”: try the thing, and if it works, it works.