You're making valid points: Not everything that is not backed up by scientific studies is useless or harmful. Also, for innovation to happen, we need to try things, because new approaches are just not necessarily backed by scientific evidence.

Yet, it is important to also not trust what is *not* backed by evidence. Lobotomy was a thing. And believing that people with mental instability were possessed by ghosts, and so on.

Some useful handles are: has it worked for the past centuries and stood the test of time? Is it an area where intuition can easily be deployed? Can the underlying mechanisms be explained by some well established science? What are the risks when it goes wrong?

Finally: Sometimes it does make sense to ask a specialist. A friend tried to self cure with MDMA and went into a big depression (yep this is anecdotal). Some major mental illnesses benefit most from medication. Hippie culture doesn't focus on curing specific symptom clusters, but focusses on general human/communal well-being, and thus generates generalists by default.

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