[duffmancd]

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."