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Around 1910, a visit to a doctor's office might have gone like this.  

"Doctor, I am really feeling terrible.  I don't seem to be able to catch my
breath.  I feel very flushed and hot and I wonder what you can tell
me."

The doctor conducts an examination and, after a while, says to the
patient, "I can't be absolutely sure, but I think that you've got
pneumonia and that's a very serious disease - typically, in pneumonia,
after a period of a few days, there will be what we call a crisis in
which you will have a very high fever and either it will kill you or you
will recover and there really won't be many bad effects.  

So, I think the best thing for you to do is to go home and talk with
your family and have them make preparations, as best they can to take
care of you during the crisis.  Bed rest, plenty of fluids."

Fast forward, now, to about 1945.  The patient comes to the doctor.
The situation is very much the same,  The doctor says, "I think that
you have pneumonia and it's probably bacterial pneumonia and, in this
case, we're very fortunate to have a medication which cures this
disease quite quickly.  It's called Penicillin and I'm going to write
you a prescription for it.  You should go home, get plenty of water
and bed rest, take this medication and you can expect to be well
within about 10 days."

Fast forward, again, to sometime in the immediate future.  Let's say,
sometime two or three years form today.

The patient comes to the doctor with exactly the same complaint:
fever, exhaustion, dyspnea, and feels generally lousy.  The doctor
says: 

"It's really hard to say what your problem is because we understand
now that each  patient is not really an archetype, but is an
individual human being who brings his entire background and cultural
perspective to the office.  We've also come to understand that disease
is (in many cases) a social construct, and so your feeling that you
have a disease may, in fact, not be something that's medically
accessible at all.  

The patient, who is old enough to remember the earlier days of
medicine, says, "But doctor, don't you have some treatment that will
help me."   

The doctor replies, "well we used to do a lot of laboratory research -
controlled studies and things like that - based on the idea that a
single medication might be good for a large number of people in spite
of the fact that they have enormous individual and cultural
differences.  But, under the influence of the new perspectives (which
originated in the social sciences) we've gone away from that."

"So, while I could give you one pill or another, or some herbal
medicine, we certainly don't feel that we can say anything about the
effectiveness of something like that.  We have to bear in mind, in
fact, that effectiveness is something that is going to be extremely
subjective."

The patient is a little taken aback, but he remembers what his grandfather
told him about medicine and asks: "well can you at least tell me what's
going to become of me?".

The doctor feels a little uncomfortable to be asked such an
old-fashioned question.  She tries gently to explain: "You have to
understand that the enormous emphasis that was placed on predictive
validity during the 20th Century was really just a symptom of a kind
of narrow minded positivist approach to the fundamental issues of our
time.  Once you set aside the privileged position of predictive
validity, you realize that all the remaining kinds of validity - as
they are called - are really (at their base) subjective."

"And, of course, while we welcome a variety of perspectives on
anything as important as the affect of drug treatments, we no longer
teach in medical school that any one of them is privileged and to be
thought of as 'the prediction' of what will happen to a patient."

"I am afraid now that our time is up because the HMO doesn't let me
spend too much time on any one patient, but I certainly hope that
things work out well for you and I've enjoyed talking to you."

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The  Question: 

Discuss why, for something as serious as medicine, this would not be
very pleasing.  Explain then why it could be pleasing for something as
serious as psychology.  Take both the  scholar's and the patient's
point of view.