[thingification]

Good to see an open mind! I think most critical rationalists would say that epidemiology is a den of weakly explanatory theories.

Even though I agree, I'm not sure that's 100% epidemiology's fault by any means: it's just a very difficult subject, at least without measurement technology, computational power, and probably (machine or human) learning and theory-building that even now we don't have. But, there must be opportunities here for people making better theories.