Sorry but anecdotal evidence is not provable: I could sell anything be it tap water or a pill of sugar, and if people feel it works then so be it, that does not mean it actually works though, to see if it actually works required a statically valid experiment, preferably blind to any bias.
In short if we are testing to see if a drug works you need to get hundreds of patients, then we will listen, with just one patient all we have to go on either experimental results from previous studies or a educated guess or we could be like you and just give them a completely unproven therapy and hope for the best, my bets are that sugar pill would be equally effective.
Most medical, surgical procedures and drug usage are not backed by studies - only by anecdotal evidence. According to the US Government’s Office of Technology Assessment (Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment: Assessing the efficacy and safety of medical technologies. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978), only 10-20% of all medical procedures and off-label drug usage are backed by clinical studies.
Strong anecdotal evidence among informed professionals is actually quite reliable - at least as reliable as clinical testing.
Many clinical tests come to diametrically opposed conclusions. You could say that the problem was discovered through anecdotal evidence - and merely confirmed through a peer reviewed study.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/peerReviewUnderTheSpotlight.php
The problem isn’t with the use of anecdotal evidence. It’s with the double standard applied by the establishment (medical and regulatory) that holds hcomplementary medicine to an absurdly higher standard, allowing medical doctors to do pretty much whatever they want. If informed anecdotal evidence is allowable for 85% of all medical procedure and drug usage, why is alternative health held to an impossible 0% standard?
Millions of people worldwide testify that homeopathy cures their illnesses yet apparently that cannot be construed as ‘evidence’.
If a person were to walk out of their house to the town centre and witness someone having their bag snatched or witness a car accident, then when they relay this information to the Police or to their friends and family, it is anecdotal evidence.
If someone go on holiday, stays at a nice hotel, eats delicious food, comes back home and relates the holiday to their friends, that is anecdotal evidence.
Does that mean that the above never happened? According to the detractors of complementary or alternative medicine, yes it does!
Millions of people have been cured of their diseases or afflictions using homeopathy, herbs, healing, vitamin supplements, special diets and on and on. Yet according to orthodox medicine all of these cures are anecdotal evidence and as such do not merit any further investigation, study, or validity. As far as orthodox medicine is concerned, these cures never happened.
Yet what if someone witnessed a car accident and the Police wanted them to make a statement? Would the statement in court be dismissed as anecdotal evidence? Would the police, even if they arrived at the scene of the accident to find the person still there comforting the passengers or trying to help, say they had not been there and their evidence is non existent? I don’t think so.
So how for so long have we put up with the top dogs in the medical establishment dismissing our cures as total nonsense, figments of our imagination, placebo cures, or outright lies?
How when millions are cured around the world using homeopathic medicines, can these cures be dismissed as unworthy of attention, simply ‘anecdotal evidence’.
Orthodox medicine implies through this that all cures with alternative medicine are untrue or simply imagined. Even when all the evidence is put before them, they become angry and even aggressive, simply refusing to see or to listen.
Yet pharmaceutical drugs cure nothing. They merely SUPPRESS the symptoms driving them deeper into the body of the patient.
Hence the eczema patient whose skin symptoms have been suppressed, goes on to develop asthma. The arthritic patient whose joint pains are suppressed, eventually will go on to develop heart disease.
The doctor makes no connection whatsoever that their drugs have created these deeper illnesses but just goes on to give the patient more and more powerful drugs, making the patient sicker still. Then when they die, they say, ‘We did everything we could’. Yes and you killed the patient!
After homeopathic treatment, careful analysis is taken of the Direction of Cure of the patient’s symptoms. Constance Hering was a converted skeptic of homeopathy. As a young man in Germany in the early nineteenth century, Hering had been assigned the task of reviewing Homeopathy because his medical mentor (a fervent anti-homeopath) had been asked by a publisher to write a book exposing homeopathy as unworthy. Having been given this task, Hering conducted a detailed study but concluded the opposite from the requested results!
source:
http://drptandon.blogspot.com/