"medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo"
What? Is there anything at all from your side which resembles an argument here?
What beef do you have with 'medical system' that you think that it is as good as just guessing everything?
Yeah, I take it you didn't know that?
If I'm on any "side" it's the side of truth and health.
Other than some kinds of surgery and a handful of chemicals (like anesthetics, the action of which is still very mysterious, and penicillin, discovered accidentally) our fancy "scientific" Western medicine is actually pretty crappy.
Now I never said it's "as good as just guessing everything", and since Galen it's been kind of scientific even, but in the USA at least, the medical system is a major cause of death. Not to mention that it's more expensive and less effective than in other first world nations.
Heck, the idea that nutrition is crucial to health is still considered new-fangled and radical!
Don't even get me started on Reiki, which is a radical healing agent I have personal experience with that is typically dismissed as pseudoscience (despite not being scientific in the first place.)
> Reiki is a pseudoscience, and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki
Here is a healing life force the very reality of which is denied by the "scientific" medical system.
So yeah, if I get creamed by a car please take me to the ER to get sewn back together, that's awesome! And some morphine please. But the current system is in many ways still stuck in the dark ages.
I'm not discussion someone who believes in Reiki.
When I first encountered Reiki, it was just my scientific curiosity that was aroused. I've experienced electromagnetic fields (e.g. a Van De Graff generator, static electricity, and so on) and currents (touch a 9v to your tongue, once touched a socket that was improperly grounded, etc.) and I have worked with simple circuits. I grok Ohm's law. I'm well-grounded in modern science (for a layman.)
So, when I felt Reiki, whatever it is, I knew something serious was going on: either it's a unknown form of bio-electricity or something even stranger.
But you don't want to discuss it.
Anyway, I just want to point out that the medical system et. al. mostly can't do better than placebo (except surgery (but then there was that study of placebo knee surgery...))
And how can you "do science" to parenting without multi-generational "longitudinal" (I think that's the word) studies with control groups?
Can we compare e.g. Amish children with Sentinelese children with tech-saturated children?
(The people of N. Sentinel Island are likely the closest thing we have to a control group for human society.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
> The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are one of the world's last uncontacted peoples.
> ...the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on the island.