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After steelmanning this article, I think the message is to try to use multiple therapies at the same time? Or that biological responses are not always dose dependent? Certainly, medicine is biased towards single diagnoses and prefer mono-therapies to combinations, but shotgun approaches frequently lead to overtreatment. Also, patients frequently complain of side effects, or are averse to medications, therefore dakka is not a good approach. Maybe in lab rats.

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I'd argue that the steelman position might be: "Understand the treatment dynamics". Treating a linear-response in the vitamin deficiency case with a binary threshold, and treating the bifurcation point in exponential battles (infection, cancer) as linear are the same class of error (just in opposite directions).

Still as another response noted, almost all of the examples are success stories of medical science, so I don't know if there is a wider point of "medical science/practice is slow to notice these nuances" or if it is just a collection of cool examples of "hey: sometimes doing a single treatment MOAR/multiple treatments simultaneously has a counter-intuative result, isn't that neat."

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