I was told long ago that the first rule of evaluating a medical treatment is to ignore all the clinical studies because nothing useful comes out of them.

I don’t know if that’s actually the case but that seems to be the prevailing thought. Which is awful, because it should be the opposite. Clinical studies should be the gold standard. They’re often conducted by people who are better doctors than scientists though. A zero-blind trial of n=4 might perhaps not be the definitive study the doctor had hoped.

(Not to pick on doctors. My wife’s one. Software developers often fall into the same common “I’m good at this one hard in-demand skill so I must be good at all of them” trap.)