[Avodah] Chazal accept medicinal treatments

[Akiva Miller]

.
R' Joel Rich asked:

> Clarke’s first law states that any sufficiently advanced
> technology is indistinguishable from magic. If so, how did
> Chazal accept any medicinal treatments from non-halachic
> sources (since no one knew how these treatments actually
> worked [and in the end they didn’t])?

First of all, if anyone is thrown by the reference to Clarke, please see
the THIRD law at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Next, I would say the same thing as others have posted, but in much simpler
terms, that it doesn't matter whether these treatments ACTUALLY worked, as
long as Chazal BELIEVED they worked. [Let's be honest. Do we really know
what works? No, we don't.]

Thus, I believe the question should be reworded to <<< how did Chazal
accept any medicinal treatments from non-halachic sources) >>>.

In other words, if our best medical minds believe that a specific treatment
DOES work, but they cannot explain HOW it works, then we can (and MUST)
ask: how do we know that this is a muttar medical treatment, and not a form
of assur magic?

As a specific example, I was going to cite aspirin, which clearly works,
though I had long believed we don't know HOW it works. Then I saw Wikipedia
("aspirin") state <<< In 1971, British pharmacologist John Robert Vane,
then employed by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, showed aspirin
suppressed the production of prostaglandinsand thromboxanes. For this
discovery he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,
jointly with Sune Bergström and Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson. >>>

Given this revelation, my question will be: How was aspirin muttar *prior
to* 1971? The generally accepted belief was that it DOES work, but that we
didn't yet understand the mechanism by which it works. In such a scenario,
how did we ascribe it to muttar refuah, and not to forbidden magic?

Disclaimer: The above is intended to he a clarification of RJR's post. I
really don't think I've added anything substantial, except for people who
may not have understood the original.

On a related note, R' Micha Berger posted:

> They only talk about establishing a qemeia mumcheh or a rofei
> mumcheh or a refu'ah. They don't talk about counter-evidence.
> And yet one doesn't need to know that 3 out of hundreds of uses
> is more likely to be a fluke or "coincidence" (if your theology
> allows for actual coincidences) than proof the medicine worked.

That's according to OUR understanding of probability. It seems that Chazal
(or possibly the ancients in general) had an entirely different way of
looking at these things. (The classic example of the nine kosher butchers
is enough to convince me of that.) Note that although they weren't on our
level of requiring double-blind randomized tests, I do recall some poskim
saying things like, "It's not enough that the qemeia worked three times; it
has to work three *consecutive* times."

Akiva Miller
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