My take on it was that we are not so far removed from witchdoctors when it comes to medicine then we would like to believe. Hard data on efficiency and performance of human doctors is very far from hard and their ability to diagnose things that are not blatantly obvious and are bout to kill you dead unless you get lucky and surgery works or chemo works(or does not and we have no clue why) is very limited.

There is a huge amount of we want to believe.. and survivor bias going on in cancer treatment. Lot's of it is very harmful as well.