4 ms·

> we're still just scratching the surface I think the same can be said of just about any field, but with medicine it's more clear to people who aren't experts

> we're still just scratching the surface I think the same can be said of just about any field, but with medicine it's more clear to people who aren't experts in the field, compared to a field like physics. As I understand it, for all of modern medicine's many marvels, it can't do much about the common cold, or tinnitus. I suppose that's analogous to how we have software that can beat any human chess player, but text-to-speech is still a work in progress. Our systems have a harder time moving the pieces than picking world-class chess moves.

tsimionescu 6y ago
I believe (though of course it could well turn out to be wrong) that physics is much closer to understanding the universe than medicine is to understanding the human body. There are big open problems in physics, absolutely. But in the domains where our theories currently apply and that we can experiment on, we can actually use them to predict with extreme accuracy how things will behave, and we have been able to exploit this to create marvels of technology like nuclear reactors, microchips, the LHC, MRIs and many others - all with essentially 100% accuracy in everything they do. In medicine on the other hand, we barely have one drug that works or doesn't work predictably in every person; we're not sure what to measure in someone to understand what potentially impacts any particular disease; we are still discovering entire organs in the human body every year; we have only recently realized that the trillions of bacteria that naturally live in our bodies have more than minor impact on our organism, but we still have little idea of what their effects actually are; and if we start looking at psychiatry or neuro-science or nutrition, we're not even sure we're asking the right questions, nevermind giving any of the right answers. Hell, there are some signs that we may have a microbiome in our brain[0], long thought to be essentially aseptic in healthy humans. [0] https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-microbiome https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-m...

tsimionescu 6y ago

I believe (though of course it could well turn out to be wrong) that physics is much closer to understanding the universe than medicine is to understanding the human body. There are big open problems in physics, absolutely. But in the domains where our theories currently apply and that we can experiment on, we can actually use them to predict with extreme accuracy how things will behave, and we have been able to exploit this to create marvels of technology like nuclear reactors, microchips, the LHC, MRIs and many others - all with essentially 100% accuracy in everything they do. In medicine on the other hand, we barely have one drug that works or doesn't work predictably in every person; we're not sure what to measure in someone to understand what potentially impacts any particular disease; we are still discovering entire organs in the human body every year; we have only recently realized that the trillions of bacteria that naturally live in our bodies have more than minor impact on our organism, but we still have little idea of what their effects actually are; and if we start looking at psychiatry or neuro-science or nutrition, we're not even sure we're asking the right questions, nevermind giving any of the right answers. Hell, there are some signs that we may have a microbiome in our brain[0], long thought to be essentially aseptic in healthy humans. [0] https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-microbiome https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-m...