Title says it all really.
In: Other
What make you think they didn’t know? Doctors today know that anti-biotics are useless against colds and other viruses – but if the patient insists, they’ll rx them.
Doctors in earlier times probably had realistic expectations about the efficacy of their treatments. But patients insist they do something – and they pay for those long shot/useless treatments. We still do.
Also, just believing the treatment works will often – the placebo effect is real.
Not all old medicine was not effective. I think your question ignores a *lot* of valid, if primitive, medical practices that have value.
But anyways, because they didn’t have a lot of options for huge double-blind scientific studies. They gave someone some herbs, and sometimes the person lived. Therefore the herbs healed them. Obviously, this doesn’t really work because sometimes people who seem very sick get better for whatever random reason. Or maybe the herbs really did help. It’s impossible to say without a well-designed scientific study.
just as you don’t know how to pronounce “their”, people use wrong stuff all the time believing that it is correct.
Most diseases resolve on their own. Even the plague had a recovery rate of up to 60%. Therefore any treatment offered would appear to “cure” a large enough percentage of sicknesses that the doctor would be convinced their medicine worked. Also just checking up on the patient, making sure they eat, drink, are clean, and aren’t in pain hastens recovery. There were also actually effective treatments especially in surgery and dentistry where their interventions worked.
What these ancient and Medieval doctors were doing were treating the surface level symptoms (pain, pus, swelling, fever etc.). These things could be treated, though it’s also possible that the body itself just naturally healed. For example, someone taking herbs that reduce fever might think that is curing them of whatever disease, when in reality the disease was caused by a virus and the immune system was fighting it. Prior to microscopes, the development of germ theory, and detailed look at biological mechanisms there was no systematic way to what (and more importantly why) things worked or didn’t work.
In the end what mattered to pre modern doctors is that these things were helping people more than doing nothing.
There’s a logical fallacy called the post hoc fallacy. It is, if event B happened after event A, then A must have caused B. This is the basis for a lot of superstitions. It’s what’s behind most ideas that some things are good luck and other things are bad luck. We see this kind of thinking in lots of different cultures, so it’s probably something humans are wired up to think. Exactly what is considered to bring good luck and what brings bad luck varies between cultures, but the basic idea is there in a lot of different ones.
A lot of medieval cures probably “worked” this way. It’s how faith healing and (at least some of) alternative medicine work, and there are people who believe in those things now.
Latest Answers