The problem is we currently tend to ignore certain biases in our process which are known to introduce errors. Once it becomes a recommended medical practice that medical professionals use, medical opinion often trumps common sense and patients have trouble defending themselves even when they, personally, are certain this is harming them.

Doctors will outright suggest you are mentally ill and need to see a therapist if your life is on the line, you aren't satisfied with their course of treatment and you question what they are doing and/or express concerns that this could kill you. Once they more or less declare you crazy for questioning them, you lose even more control over your body, your health, your life and your right to actively make decisions for yourself.

There is definitely room for improvement in our current process.

That western medicine is often full of itself, deeply [insert -ism or -phobia] in practice, and frequently misguided is all very true and reasonable criticism. The person I replied to was essentially writing off the entire foundation of western medicine because doctors and medical science people don't always fully understand why things work.

It would be like someone writing off Newtonian physics before quantum mechanics was a thing because a lot more of the how wasn't yet understood. The practice of medicine has moved past the "if she floats, she's made of wood, and that means she's a witch" phase even if it still sees anyone other than cishet white dudes as witches.

Well that's not what I heard.

I think my comment says essentially the same thing theirs did.

I don't know. But how can we really claim things are "proven" or the trials are "rigorous" when they literally assume some sort of magic in their fundamental design? I mean we should at the very least dial down our certainty in medical claims until scientists can satisfactorily explain why they think new age woo/homeopathy/etc is beyond the pale neanderthal stupidity, up until the moment it's relabelled "placebo" when suddenly it can work.

I mean we're in an environment where the US President is forcing an entire nation to take an experimental medical treatment on the back of (failed!) trials, simply because politician's faith in "science" and the medical establishment is 100% unshakeable. Largely because scientists themselves hardly seem to admit to the true levels of uncertainty in their own work (replication crisis etc). There's a huge mismatch between people's perception of study rigor and "sometimes people think themselves better lol magic innit", which is basically the state of our understanding of the placebo effect.