I hope mmphosis clarifies what he means by "western medicine", because I'm confused by that term myself. It's not about the modern issue where the US FDA mandates that "only a drug can cure, prevent, treat, or diagnose a disease" (so if you try and sell oranges under the claim that they prevent scurvy you can be thrown in jail), since he mentioned 1000 years. I don't think he meant that western medicine has any less a desire than non-western medicine to "make people better".

I hope he doesn't mean homeopathy since I hope we can all agree that's a silly enterprise good only for making its proponents more money. But I suspect the "western medicine" refers to alternative treatments that don't have to be homeopathic. I think his overall meaning is that for current medical research, the memory of the field only goes back 1000 years or so, which may or may not be true. (I'd argue it's closer to 100 years.) It may be a call for more testing of what old societies used to do for various things, such as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese, and whether any valid techniques are there that we should bring back. I seem to recall off-hand that St. John's Wort historically has a use for depression, and in some study had about the same effectiveness as some other depression drug (though neither were much better than a placebo); if this is really the case then we need more studies on St. John's Wort to confirm and in the US particularly we need some new FDA rules and reduction of power (or just get rid of them). A similar point is made when people say "stop destroying rainforests, there may be a cure for cancer there!" There probably isn't, but it's not like we were looking very hard anyway, and maybe we should.

There is no such thing as the scientific method. What you're thinking of (presumably something Popperian) is not how science is really done. A lot of science is pig-headedly ignoring evidence which tells you a theory is wrong. Sometimes that works itself out and you get a better theory (see Einstein). Other times it doesn't.

Look, the purpose of medicine is to make people healthy. Definitions of 'healthy' are different for different cultures and social groups at different times. Western scientific medicine is only one approach for one kind of culture, and it often does more harm than good.

Furthermore, western scientific medicine often ignores procedures and knowledge coming from non-western sources which, when translated into scientific language, turn out to be correct within the WSM framework.

edit: formatting