>This argument is so silly against reality, and already, almost nobody understands the things they put in their body to any significant degree, beyond the effect produced.

he isnt saying that person who puts stuff into their body should understand it

it is that someone (expert) should understand it to the point he can vouch for it

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simianwords 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

False. Experts don’t understand many drugs and still prescribe it. And it’s a good thing.

	▲	curt15 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is that a satisfactory state of affairs? "Experts" also prescribed thalidomide for years before embarking on a decades-long scramble to unravel its teratogenic properties. "Experts" also initially prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. While empiricism is an important part of medical sciences, medicine is not a purely empirical subject because pure empiricism is insufficient in the long run. The software analog of settling merely for "it seems to work" would be if someone were to hand you a bare binary whose behavior must be inferred entirely through black box testing, without source code, architecture diagrams, or any other documentation. Sure, users can try running it in a pinch, which is the case for various medications, but it's surely possible to do better in the long run.

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quickthrowman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nobody understands the mechanism behind general anesthesia, yet there’s a medical speciality dedicated to practicing it and it’s done every single day for a wide variety of procedures. We have figured out how to use general anesthesia in a relatively safe way, but nobody understands why it works.

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kyawzazaw 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doctors prescribe accutane