I love that anecdotes are considered worthless in medicine when in fact they're very clearly good places to start.
Take an anecdote and do a small population study to try and find correlation. Then if there are any significant results, start looking for causation.
In history nothing is legit except for primary sources. In medicine, it seems, primary sources -- no matter how compelling -- are worth a damn. Hilarious.
No. Medicine is so broad and subjective that it's easy to find an anecdote implying almost anything. That's why expensive double blind is so important -- even doctors fool themselves.
How many "carrots cured my cancer" wild goose chases would it take to bankrupt even the biggest company? Whatever that number is, it's smaller than the number of wild-ass medical anecdotes rolling around out there.
Of course, everybody thinks that their own anecdote is compelling and obvious and all their friends on carb-free diets are idiots...
