It's interesting that people keep lumping Medicine in with Science.'nThe popular use of "Medicine" - i.e. your Doctor - is not Science.

[subjacentish@zeroes.ca]

It's interesting that people keep lumping Medicine in with Science.

The popular use of "Medicine" - i.e. your Doctor - is not Science.

It follows none of Science's trajectory and the people who practice it have no Scientific training or literacy. And that's to be expected.

Because Doctor Medicine is:

a) purely outcome-based: Heal patient, fix patient. "Understanding" is way down there on the list along with "Trip to Cancun" and "more admin assistants."

b) high stakes: if I fuck up a morpheme analysis, nobody dies. If they fuck up a treatment, somebody dies. I never have to tell the family of a verb stem that I got its affixes wrong.

From those two things, you end up with the fact that Medicine is VERY VERY CONSERVATIVE.

They want socially-acceptable outcomes and they want to proceed to those outcomes in socially acceptable ways. In the extremely high stakes they work under, this is how you maintain your job and avoid blame.

[subjacentish@zeroes.ca]

This isn't to say btw that Doctors don't have important observations to contribute to Science.

Car mechanics have an enormous amount of insight to offer for car design and use. Literally everybody involved in the design of vehicles should be taking their experiences into account.

But they're not automotive engineers.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@subjacentish I find this comparison quite interesting because from my perspective Engineering isn't Science either, but in many ways the relationship between Science and Engineering is indeed similar to that between Engineering and the work of a mechanic. And Medicine is basically Engineering for the human body.