Nonsense. Sometimes people noticing what is blown off as *anecdotal accounts* is the beginning of people noticing a trend.
Clinical trials *sometimes* misleading?????
Considering the increase in revelation of the amount of fraud in *studies*, I'd consider anecdotal evidence to be far more reliable than deliberate fraud.
None other than the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial a few years ago in which he bemoaned the sorry state of “medical research”, and said that 95% of published research papers are simply wrong, and often even fraudulent. He went on to say that this phenomenon was being driven by the cutthroat competition for research grants, leading many “researchers” to do whatever it took, even fraud, to draw attention to their “research.”
“Publish or perish” has consequences.