Okay, so which method would you recommend to an average patient instead?
Listening to experts is the (imperfect) solution for a society with division of labor, so that most people don't have to study medicine and statistics and make their own experiments. General education can make you dismiss the most obvious nonsense, but beyond that you need an expertise, and either you spend years to develop it yourself, or you outsource it to other people.
I don't think that you can effectively delegate all decisions about your health to someone else.
There are no effective noninvasive expert-based weight loss regiments. At the same time there are people who lose weight through being motivated to lose weight and working on the goal.
A product such as 23andMe can give a patient useful information about their health without there being a expert doctor who tries to translate. Current laws prevent a customer to buy data interpretation directly from 23andMe.
Last week I was with a bunch of experts at a workshop pa...
John Ioannidis has written a very insightful and entertaining article about the current state of the movement which calls itself "Evidence-Based Medicine". The paper is available ahead of print at http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf.
As far as I can tell there is currently no paywall, that may change later, send me an e-mail if you are unable to access it.
Retractionwatch interviews John about the paper here: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/16/evidence-based-medicine-has-been-hijacked-a-confession-from-john-ioannidis/
(Full disclosure: John Ioannidis is a co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), where I am an employee. I am posting this not in an effort to promote METRICS, but because I believe the links will be of interest to the community)