I agree. When I first started looking into medications like Aderall, it was surprising to find how little we actually know about how medicine works.
Take the above example - we really don't know how it works. We measure the amount of dopamine/serotonin in the spine before and after you take it so we assume it increases the presence of those chemicals in the brain, but it's not really mapped out.
A lot of people have the misconception that we understand the body the way we understand other technologies. That you can balance a chemical equation and deduce how something will effect the body.
While we understand a lot, this really isn't the case. And for all practical purposes it sometimes is treated like "magic".
The brain (and how it works) specifically is an area that modern medicine really hasn't figured out yet. I learned this when my father had a stroke. Talking to the doctors I learned that, unlike the rest of the body, our understanding of the brain is still sufficiently primitive that it's treated as sort of a black box.
Yes. As an example, you'd be surprised by how few MDs that are experts in their respective fields have a detailed understanding of the pharmacokinetics of the drug they're prescribing. They just take the dose the drug company did trials at and go with it.
One reason is that it takes a lot of modeling to understand why to dose 1x twice a week vs 2x once a week, so everyone gets roughly the same dose.
