Best521 strongly recommended Dr. Mukherjee's latest book, "The Song of the Cell". I looked up the reference, and ended up ordering all four of his books. I am currently reading his tiny, 70-page, "The Laws of Medicine", and thought some of you would be interested in his "three principles that govern modern medicine":
1. A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weak test.
2. "Normals" teach us rules; "outliers" teach us laws.
3. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
Dr. Mukherjee concludes, "...decision making in the face of uncertain, inaccurate, and imperfect information, remains absolutely vital to the life of medicine." I think what he may be saying is that patients are individuals about whom doctors know very little. Still, doctors must make decisions about each individual's care.
We patients may simply need to accept the limitations of this imperfect approach. Of course, we may choose to make any modifications we intuitively think will suit our individual uniqueness better, but that decision is ours alone.