We’ve been told for years that doctors can determine the answer to that question.
But cases like this one show us they can’t.
I’ve been losing confidence in science (medicine, high technology, meteorology, etc.) for some time now because of its blunders. And my skepticism has grown as I’ve seen it co-opted in service of greed, political power, atheistic ideologies, and so on.
No doctor can foretell the future. Martin’s mind slowly began to heal itself, and nothing could have been done medically to speed up the process or recognize the faint glimmer of cognition when it didn’t yet exist.
“I’ve been losing confidence in science (medicine, high technology, meteorology, etc.) for some time now because of its blunders.”
Science does not blunder, it is people who pretend to be competent scientists that do the blundering.
It should also be noted that so-called medicine is frequently practiced as an art or less and not as a science. Your typical general practice physician practices clinical medicine, meaning they do not conduct scientific inquiry into a patient’s medical problems. Instead, they apply pro forma policies and doctrines which purport and often fail to be fully scientific in their application to a patient’s medical problems.
Science is like any other human endeavor from science to religion, the reliability of the discipline is only as good as the performance of those persons who purport to practice the discipline. Science is unlike some other disciplines to the extent its truths can be reliably determined by observation of repeatable and predictable experiment.