Abstract
What is medicine? One obvious answer is that medicine is the business of curing
sick people. Of course this answer would need to be qualified to handle things
like cosmetic surgery and sex change operations, on one side, and to handle
palliative care and supportive treatment on the other. I’m not interested in these
qualifications. I’m interested in the kernel idea: that medicine is basically the
business of curing sick people.
The trouble with this idea is that doctors aren’t very good at curing sick people.
Looking at the various medical traditions one finds through history and across
the world, the curative powers of these traditions ranges from mediocre to
awful...