Is the point of the analogy you are trying to make that we should be less like Hippocrates and more like the wise ladies? That we should ignore all persuit of health?
Is the better argument not that the wise ladies were onto something? Traditional medicines are a mixed bag, but some herbal remedies are truly effective and have since been integrated into scientific medicinal practices. Rather than inventing his own theoretical framework, Hippocrates would have been better-served by investigating the existing herbal practices and trying to identify the truly-effective from the placebo. Trial-and-error is a form of empiricism, after all—and this seems to be how cultural knowledge like herbal medicine came to be.
Apologies for my previous comment—I missed the “read more” button on the guidelines.
In my own search for a good baseline for epistemic truth, I’ve come to a similar position to this, and thought it was worth mentioning that my path routed through cybernetics and systems theory, process philosophy, and social constructivism and anti-realist philosophy. I’m not sure if there’s a more specific term of art for these ideas besides “holism”, whose well has been somewhat poisoned, but naturalism strikes me as a good fit.
I’ve found it a helpful exercise when trying to break down the perception of concrete boundaries, to borrow from cybernetics and mentally model objects as not being distinct without being causally disconnected. A deer is not a deer without the vegetation it eats; it cannot exist separated from its environment. We have higher order “object” conceptions like ecosystems or world-systems where we are perfectly willing to accept an object as having ephemeral links make up parts of its whole but it seems we have a harder time breaking the whole object category when the parts are contiguous. I’m not sure if this perspective is culturally or evolutionarily grounded, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.