And thus starts the chapter and the argument on medicine having taken authority over the notion of disease (and most likely well-being as well).

The year 1913 marks a watershed in the history of modern medicine. Around that year a patient began to have more than a fifty-fifty chance that a graduate of a medical school would provide him with a specifically effective treatment (if, of course, he was suffering from one of the standard diseases recognized by the medical science of the time). Many shamans and herb doctors familiar with local diseases and remedies and trusted by their clients had always had equal or better results. Since then medicine has gone on to define what constitutes disease and its treatment.