I know far too many aging hippies and their kids who believe all kinds of nonsense to really care what kind of health claims they’re making. I just tune out.
One guy was saying you can replace sleep with LSD. He changed his mind, but would you believe it or just do what I did smile nod and move on?
I wouldn't believe that, but there are plenty of other activities that I do because people have anecdotally reported that they benefitted from them. In this case I would use my internal judgment and intuition to decide based on benefits vs cost/risk. Does it seem unlikely to harm me, but many people have suggested they benefit from it? Sure, I will try it. I will see if I feel better or notice anything. If I don't, that's fine. If I do, I wouldn't necessarily know if it is beyond placebo or not, but I could keep doing it to see how it affects my life and if it keeps seemingly positive I can decide to keep doing it even though I don't have scientifically unquestionable truth that it is actually helping me. People have survived generations and found things that work without needing everything to be scientifically verified.
When tested the overwhelming majority of things that “survived generations” didn’t work.
It’s amazing just how bad that stuff turned out to be. You personally can try whatever you feel like but the odds are just terrible that your going to find anything beyond mild pain relief and the risks can be go significantly beyond wasting time.
How do you pick the set from where you are picking the "overwhelming majority"?
I would argue that most things we use daily now started out as anecdotes rather than science experiments. Most of the food we eat, etc. The buildings we live in, being in the nature, exercise, sleep, etc.
They were all anecdotally described before we were able to run proper science on them.
Moving the goalposts a bit there, there’s no way in which wood’s utility depends on random peoples observations they can point to its actual use in a structure. We’re just talking about medicine here because we can’t see people’s past condition.
So the set includes all forms of historically practiced medicine from anywhere in the globe. From Chinese medicine to Voodoo, people did all kinds of things to dry to get better. Our ancestors didn’t use electronics, plastics, synthetic fibers, aluminum, etc which is a large fraction of what people interact with in a daily basis.
Western medicine kept a tiny fraction native from wound care via Honey to willow bark, the stuff that worked was either copied or refined when active ingredients were isolated. But when the actual useful techniques are under 1%, there’s hardly a reason for you to individually investigate people’s random claims.
Consider all of homeopathy is useless, for you to say test each individual treatment would be just as silly as individually testing each different prayer in faith healing.
