[hunson_abadeer]

I think it's easy to come up with such delineation after the fact, but OP was looking for a more comforting answer. By the sound of it, they just didn't like the implications of the initial diagnosis. It wasn't about facts not adding up.

The reality is that modern medicine is absolutely amazing, but there are also many interventions backed by shoddy science or no science at all. Sometimes, "doing your own research" exposes such lapses. Sometimes, it sends you off the deep end and you end up chasing ghosts. To allow the former, you need to tolerate some of the latter.

And yeah, sometimes the shoddy science involves interventions so basic and so common that you'd think they're sorted out. Consider that Europe and the US take wildly divergent views on topics such as wisdom teeth, colonoscopies, or the value of flu vaccines.

"Science literacy" doesn't shield you from being wrong. Maybe it helps, but there's no shortage of Nobel laureates who believe in conspiracy theories or promote dubious medical treatments. Talking about "science literacy" is usually just how geeks convince themselves that their beliefs can't be wrong.

[Waterluvian]

It’s funny how every generation of modern medicine acts like this time they know 100% what the correct answers are while we all scoff at how wrong they got it just a few decades ago.

Every generation the advice on which way to put your kid to sleep flip flops.

It would be shamefully foolish to disregard all the incredible advances and technologies that modern medicine offers. It would be equally shamefully foolish to think it’s not still deeply flawed.

[bombcar]

This is true across more domains than medicine - especially in IT, the absolute assurance that those idiots 5 years ago were brain dead but now we’ve solved all the things.