> People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct
Maybe we have different definitions of "unscientific". It doesn't mean the same as "works well".
> just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work.
No, that just means they are unscientific.
If we want people to stop treating science like magic, we need to stop conflating "effective", "natural", and "is consistent with scientific findings" with "scientific".
If your experiments are not reproducible, it's not scientific. If the experiments and observations don't deal with sufficiently precise measurements (no '3 pinches of this'), it's not scientific. If it can't be tested with prediction, experimentation, and observation, it's not scientific.
That's not to say it's wrong or that collective discovery isn't a thing. It's just not science. This is important because collective memory can be right, but it can be wrong. Folk medicine says things like "pregnant women should eat protein to have a boy" and "rhino horn cures diseases of the pancreas". We need a way to collectively vet these hypotheses. That's what the scientific method is for.
Maybe we have different definitions of "unscientific". It doesn't mean the same as "works well".
> just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work.
No, that just means they are unscientific.
If we want people to stop treating science like magic, we need to stop conflating "effective", "natural", and "is consistent with scientific findings" with "scientific".
If your experiments are not reproducible, it's not scientific. If the experiments and observations don't deal with sufficiently precise measurements (no '3 pinches of this'), it's not scientific. If it can't be tested with prediction, experimentation, and observation, it's not scientific.
That's not to say it's wrong or that collective discovery isn't a thing. It's just not science. This is important because collective memory can be right, but it can be wrong. Folk medicine says things like "pregnant women should eat protein to have a boy" and "rhino horn cures diseases of the pancreas". We need a way to collectively vet these hypotheses. That's what the scientific method is for.