[Avodah] Chazal accept medicinal treatments

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 08:14:40AM -0400, Akiva Miller via Avodah wrote:

> 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)>>>.
...

I want to make explicit something that I think is implied in what
you said.

The amoraim of Bavel spent a lot more space talking about sheidim,
qemeios, and all those other things the Rambam would have preferred they
not bring up than the amoraim of EY. The number of references one finds
on the Yerushalmi can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and with
spare fingers too.

But then, the same was true of the beliefs of the surrounding Bavli
culture.

Did Chazal buy into local superstitions?

Or, were sheidim (eg) seen as science?

Astrology was taken as science for centuries beyond their day. The IE,
a rationalist, was an astrologer because in his world there was no
contradiction between the two.

Getting back to Clark's Third Law... The inverse is also true: Once
science is sufficiently disproven, it is indistinguishable from
superstition.


> 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.) ...

I agree with your general point.

But once I came up with a way to explain qavua to myself, the fact that
we take a majority of qavu'os, and not a majority of pieces of meat didn't
surprise me. The very presence of a qavu'ah (or 9, in the case of stores)
already killed our motivation for a purely statistical solution.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 You are where your thoughts are.
http://www.aishdas.org/asp           - Ramban, Igeres haQodesh, Ch. 5
Author: Widen Your Tent
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF