> At an essential level, science can't answer how many things work... Indeed, science provides scant information about how drugs work and that includes medicat

> At an essential level, science can't answer how many things work... Indeed, science provides scant information about how drugs work and that includes medications with effects (favorable or not) in the brain. The reality is that drugs have a great number of effects very few of which receive adequate study. IOW while there are useful target effects that are exploited, the fact that drugs are more or less tolerable is largely a matter of luck. This reality is illustrated by instances of tragic drug outcomes despite long use in clinical practice. Of course observing for and identifying random events (adverse effects) depends on the sample size. Registration trials generally use hundreds to a few thousand people which is highly unlikely to reveal serious, rare outcomes occurring on the order of 1/100K recipients. Monitoring of after-market AEs is necessary to detect such anomalous outcomes. The upshot is that clinical practice is at least as much art form as reliant on science. But as you say this is also the case with all science, albeit to a variable degree. It implies your statement should read "science can't answer how anything actually works" since there's no way to know what is not yet known. That doesn't mean we have no useful knowledge, far from it, as the vast array of extant productive technologies clearly shows. But in truth we can't fully "explain" anything, we have to be content developing usable "working solutions" to real-world problems. To my mind process of science is satisfactory to the extent we accept the inherent constraints of human knowledge. With that acceptance we gain the flexibility to move forward, to find new and better working solutions, and add insightful observations to the knowledge base of science.