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Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

After studying pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I lost a lot of faith in our current pharmacological medicine.

The tl;dr is that chemistry is incredibly complex and then biology is even more complex and messy. Even if we think we understand the mechanism by which a medicine may work, we definitely do not know how something will certainly behave in the wider system OR whether something works the way we truly think it does (by the time a medicine arrives in the place it needs to be is it actually some chemical artifact after being "touched" so many times along the way).

We have a complex system, and we don't have the author or source code to hand, and we're still quite limited in how we can observe any changes. Any time we do try to introduce something we basically have to pray that there are no side effects

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> After studying pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I lost a lot of faith in our current pharmacological medicine.

My reaction was just the opposite. There are so many aspects of physics or other physical sciences that we take as basic knowledge and learn in grade school, but which were discovered years ago by some of the greatest thinkers of the past. It’s deceptively easy to wonder what it would have been like to live back then when the science was young and discoveries seemed more readily available. When you didn’t need to build a massive supercollider to validate theories. Of course much of this thinking is probably a fallacy... hundreds of years from now people will think similar thoughts about where we are.

And yet medicine quite clearly seems at this earlier stage. Think about how far we’ve come in just the last century... we’ve only known about antibiotics for 100 years and the structure of DNA for half that long. That’s not a reason to be dismissive, medicine right now is in its early days and the people doing the research are pioneers. Medicine today has so many opportunities for smart people to contribute.

Right and that's fine - I agree an optimistic way to look at medicine is that we have yet so much more to discover.

But I look at the massive pro-medicate industry that is incentivised to get us to take medicine which is built upon disappointingly unrigorous discipline and the confidence some doctors carry themselves on matters which really aren't as clear cut as they think and I kind of want to nope out of the system - I'd rather lean on my body to fix itself whenever I can.

(ironically the best doctors I know generally advise the same, the exception being all the obvious cases where medicine has successfully intervened)

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