Reply #3: Early humans and modern non-literate humans [View All]

[SheilaT]

are exceptionally good at noticing if someone has a response -- good or bad -- after ingesting something. Heck, even us literate types have no trouble recalling that time we ate something and had a bad reaction. Trial and error isn't such a bad thing. The reason for complicated drug trials these days is that they're often trying to tease out a relatively mild difference of some kind.

And every single one of the drawbacks of herbal remedies can be applied to the scientific ones. Sometimes the manufacturing plant makes a bad batch of a drug. Pharmacists have been known to dilute drugs -- there was a big story several years ago about a Kansas City area pharmacist who did just that over a period of years with cancer drugs. My point here is that while almost all the time the "scientific" drugs aren't 100% reliable either. Although most of the time they are a very good bet.