Title says it all really.
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they didnt.
cures were often “we did something, the patient didnt die, eventually they got better (on their own), we cured them” if the same symptoms were treated the same way with the same results it was accepted.
if a different doctor tried a different treatment and got results faster or more reliably, then that cure would be used more
in 1000 years time, all of our medicine might look silly to the citizens of the future
When they applied cures, people got better. When they didn’t, they didn’t get better. That could fool anyone.
It would be a while until the placebo effect was understood.
To know if something is ineffective, you have to be able to compare it to something that is more effective or less effective.
When they were doing things like bloodletting or giving herbal remedies, they were comparing rates of survival to “people who we aren’t treating”. Well, guess what? That meant they were comparing people who were *receiving attention* thus probably being fed and given water vs. people who were *not* getting those things. So they saw higher survival rates and assumed their treatment was working. And they weren’t wrong, they just weren’t testing all the variables.
The only reason we KNOW those treatments are ineffective is we know more now. Not to mention for many conditions, we’ve found medicines that we can PROVE are dramatically better at improving recovery and survival than anything else. So even if some weird folk remedy has like a 5% increase in speed of recovery, that’s a goofy choice if there’s a medicine with a 95% increase over that.
Put simply, it’s because often they WERE effective, but they were mistaken about the cause or vector for illnesses.
Take miasma, for instance. This was a belief that bad smells could cause disease. To reduce stench, some medieval cities enacted policies that put bans on tanning too close to domiciles, did not allow slaughtering to be done within city walls, and forced people to dispose of spoiled food. During early instances of the plague, people who were not immediate family or notaries were often forbidden from entering the home of the deceased, and bodies had to be buried immediately in a sealed coffin at a depth of 6 feet.
We know now that the smell of rot isn’t what makes you ill or gives you the plague. But eradicating the source of the stench (which is actually harbouring the germs that make you sick) still had the effect of reducing illness.
But filling your mask with herbs to reduce the smell of a dying or dead person wasn’t as effective because the cause of the illness wasn’t really the smell, but the germs.
They did a thing, and sometimes the patient got better. Huzzah! They will do that same thing next time too.
They know that their cures did not really work, but they need the money. Even today people pay for fake medicine that is proven not to work. Like Homöopathie. Hope and fear makes people to trust liars and pay for “help”.
The idea behind things we now take for granted like control groups in a study did not exist. There was no statistical approach to outcomes, no doctors were doing actual studies.
Now, if we want to see if a new drug will help people, we take a very rigorous approach. We test the drug on a large group of people (generally thousands of people) not just one or two. We take detailed notes and measurements on what the drug does; if you have a drug to treat cancer, did the tumors get smaller, and if so by how much? We have comparison groups like monitoring the condition of people that didn’t get the drug to see how the disease normally progresses, so that we can compare the treatment group and see if they actually do better.
Back then, a doctor just has some idea about a disease. ‘Tumors are bad. Oak trees grow oak galls, those are kind of like tumors. Trees are healthy though, even if they get these little tumors. Maybe if I grind up the oak galls and give it to this person with cancer, they will be healthy like an oak tree. I gave it to one person, and he seemed to get better! My idea must be true. Oak galls cure cancer! I’ll tell everyone. What’s that? You tried it on someone else and they died? Well, you must have prepared the medicine wrong, or maybe they were already too sick for the treatment to be effective.’ Failures are ignored or excused for long periods until treatments basically just fall out of fashion rather than being proven to be useless.
The approach that we have in modern science is something like “if I try to disprove this idea as hard as I can and fail, then the idea is probably true”. The approach in the past was “if I have any evidence to support my idea, even just my own imagination, then the idea is probably true”.
There are a lot of remedies that DID work. Like, not as strongly as some modern medicine, but significantly better than nothing.
Even in cases where the remedy didn’t do anything itself, it would often require bed rest and other things that do actually help the body recover and that gets marked as a false positive
Same reasons people now don’t know that things like Homeopathy don’t work in the slightest. Regression to the mean and the placebo effect. People usually seek help when they are sickest and people also usually get over sicknesses. If you get bless with leaches at the peak of a sickness then get better afterwards because that was the normal course of the sickness, you’d probably attribute that to the leaches (or the homeopathic pills).
People can recover from some injuries or illnesses on their own. If you give someone a remedy for their condition, they might get better on their own, which makes the remedy seem effective even if it’s not. Some illnesses flare up, get better, then recur later. An ineffective remedy can appear effective in this case, too. You have to have a proper control group to tell if a remedy is actually working in a situation like this.
Getting better and feeling better aren’t the same thing. Feeling better is complicated, and is affected by things like the feeling that you’re doing something about an illness. This is why, in drug trials, people often don’t know if they’re actually getting the drug or not.
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