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Originally Posted by xepherys
Once a medication is 'known' to help manic depression, it still may or may not work in any given patient. It may also make things worse.
From this perspective psychiatry (and to a lesser degree psychology, since medication is not involved) is a guessing game. Or rather, it is in a constant state of theory. Physics is in theory until a general proof is made. Psychiatry is in theory for each new patient. That's why I'm isolating them.
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I agree that psychology/psychiatry is a soft science, but due to the dynamic nature of the human body and mind. I disagree that physics is a hard science because it can be "proven." Nothing in physics can be proven- ever. Not even mathematics can be proven as the foundations of math state that it is in itself true. Physics has models that can be demonstrated to be accurate to the workings of the universe- again you can't prove them, just demonstrate their accuracy.
These models can be falsified- given new conditions. For instance, Newtonian verses Einsteinian mechanics. Einstein's model of the universe were shown accurate- Newton was wrong. But this didn't stop the egg heads at NASA from putting Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat when we went to the moon. Newtonian models are still very accurate- and unarguably much simpler than Einsteinian models- given that the conditions are not relativistic (speeds beyond 10%c).
Psychology, Psychiatry, etc, have so many conditions (some even unknown), which is why we get these medical guessing games (making shows like
House, MD so entertaining). While psychiatric medicine may be a guessing game now, the varying conditions are no different than one whom tries to use Newtonian mechanics to describe what happens on a vessel moving at roughly 30,000 kilometers per second.