To quote the article: "Mukherjee’s laws of medicine are laws of uncertainty, imprecision, and incompleteness. ...". I don't know if these ideas constitute scie

To quote the article: "Mukherjee’s laws of medicine are laws of uncertainty, imprecision, and incompleteness. ...". I don't know if these ideas constitute science "laws", but of course the practice of medicine is bounded by such factors. Then again what discipline of any importance is not also similarly constrained? A common theme on HN is the inevitability of software flaws, the uncertainties and corner cases inherent in programming tools, like compilers, render satisfactory outcomes a matter of probability, not at all unlike medical diagnosis and treatment. Nothing new, medicine has been regarded in the last century or so as an art, with a basis in science to the extent it exists. Truth is that a great many phenomena have received little or no study, yet unstudied problems still show up in the office every day and must somehow be addressed. Good practitioners welcome scientific contribution and eager to employ "evidence-based" procedures. Trouble is there's not much guidance forthcoming, leaving those in the front lines doing what they can with the inadequate tools in the toolbox. It's worth adding that a substantial part of the probabilistic nature of the work is attributable to the limitless variability of human illness. I've long expressed the idea in a terse form: The reality is no two people ever have exactly the same disease. The subtle differences are what make diagnosis and treatment a constant challenge. Put another way, abstraction is at once a powerful benefit and potential source of error. Declaring a patient's condition falls into a particular diagnosis lends a valuable clue. However such categorization may easily blind us to the small, crucially important distinctions among sufferers with the same diagnosis. We can easily be fooled by our own cleverness. Point is that the intuition, the talent, of a fine practitioner will always defy "explanations", and that makes it an art. Edit: punctuation