No, medicine is NOT a science. It is a profession whose purpose is to heal the sick. It certainly uses science, but its primary mission is to make people better, not to understand their biology. Of course, understanding biology (a real science) is key to understanding medicine, but most doctors are emphatically not scientists. In most cases, I would say that they care far less how a given medicine works, that that it works. That is why so many doctors used medicines “off label”. They think it won’t do any harm (which is the first part of the approval process of any medicine), and they guess that it might do some good. If it seems to, they keep using it. However, there is a problem here. Let’s say that the off label use really does help, but in the particular group of folks they are giving it to, one in a thousand patients dies. Well, no single doctor is going to treat a thousand such patients, so they will be completely unaware of the potential danger of this use of the medicine. Further, if the occasional patient dies, they will have no idea that this use of the medicine is the problem. Of course, as the author says, there are a huge number of variables in human biology, and consequently nearly all conclusions are tentative, but that is no reason not to try our best to determine scientifically which treatments work and which don’t. As the author of the last post says, much of what doctors do is make educated guesses, which is fine. That is what most scientists do as well. The difference is that scientist have to be very clear about when we are guessing and when we actually know the answer. The same is not always true for doctors. Most of us who have been patients have had the experience of having doctors state something with complete confidence even when they really are just guessing, or doing something that seemed to work in the past, or that an other doctor said worked for them. Of course they have to do that, and they have always done that (even when they were bleeding patients and force feeding them arsenic) because no one wants to be treated by someone that doesn’t seem to know what they are doing. Some people call this arrogant, but I think it’s an unavoidable requirement for being a doctor. Unfortunately, I think this can also lead to an unwillingness to be confronted by evidence that their personal favorite treatment actually doesn’t really work. So, let’s not be naïve about what science can and can’t do, but let’s also not be naïve about how scientific most doctors actually are.