Modern medicine is a result of one of those breaks with tradition - specifically, a change in mindset from using received wisdom such as, "this is how we've always done it" to a more experimental, evidence-based approach to deciding how to do things.

In the spirit of modern medicine, I'd suggest that that article was chock full of stats that should get much higher billing than a line of reasoning that's of a kind with one of the main ones that people use to promote acupuncture.

My line of reasoning was "it must have been within acceptable ranges of risk because otherwise the species would be extinct or doing something differently," not a pure appeal to tradition. The statistics back this up, hence my mentioning them first.

I think it's a bit extreme to suggest that the standard for an acceptable range of risk is anything that doesn't cause our species to go extinct.

We tend to put a greater value on human life than that, even (or especially), traditionally.