I’m treating religion as a kind of system of ideas, which means the individual ideas are the particles of the system.

What do you suggest Id o instead?

Admin just summed up the internet. Well done!

Let me use blunt trauma injuries as a particular way to expose revealed preferences. Perhaps one parent in ten million thinks, when they’re son gets in a car or sports (or war) accident resulting in bleeding and broken bones, that they’d be at least as well off not getting the immediate attention of paramedics, stabilized with a host of sanitized and validated drugs, devices, and techniques, shuffled to an emergency room, treated by surgeons, and have their bones set with plaster or pins or even replaced – with antibiotics thrown in to prevent opportunistic (from the scene) or Iatrogenic (from other ill people in the care facility) infection.

Emergency medicine, in particular, has made measurably great strides in the past few decades – which is part of why both the ‘homicide rate’ and ‘battle fatality per potentially-fatal incident rate’ have declined so markedly (thwarting various attempts at time-series analysis).

Implicit in this discussion seems to be a strange linguistic nomonym where ‘Medicine’ means both the ‘good, obviously beneficial medicine I’d always unhesitatingly use’ and the ‘bad, ineffective medicine that doesn’t really know how to cure the uncertain cause of this particular symptom’.

So, is it just so that we can believe in (some) medicine and bitch about (some) medicine at the same time without needing to be more specific?

As long as ‘medicine’ or ‘doctors’ is your shorthand for ^^ that practice, then of course you’re absolutely right. And I think your other suggestion is equally correct: first-world standards of health/longevity have more to do with the benefits of modernization as a more general system of practices rather than with the existence of doctors. That being said, who would you like treating your family: a Namibian witch doctor, a Civil War-era surgeon, a well-meaning physician working before the discovery of penicillin, or a contemporary graduate of UCLA or Oxford medical school?