That positioning as a means of repair together with the orientation towards science created something that is nowadays known as Western Medicine. The subjects and topics of it are events in the past. Its methods need to be, at least in principle, be confirmed by rigorous, positivistic science. One of the hallmarks of that science, in fact any modern science, is the more or less complete control of experimental conditions, also known as the ceteris paribus condition.

That constellation, or self-image, however, creates large areas that are excluded from medicine. Basically, any more integrative perspective, spanning across different organ systems, or levels of organization, is currently excluded from a scientific medicinal approach. The complexity in the biology of a living organism renders the ceteris paribus approach of a dissecting positivistic science impossible. For the same reason, Randomized Controlled Trials, RCT, which are the methodological gold standard in medicine, are impossible for a large range of questions. RCTs have basically be conceived as observed interventions, experiments, very much in the style of experiments in a laboratory. Yet, with only a few exceptions we can not perform experiments with humans.

Randomized Controlled Trials are not suitable for or can’t be applied, if

• the research question extends over a long period of time,

• the subject matter touches a lot of variables, such as aging,

• the target is a prospective personalized optimization.