As the basis for it, certainly, but anecdotal evidence still isn’t science. It’s how you generate a hypothesis. Then you test it and see if you can support the hypothesis with more than just anecdotes.
This is both true, and a travesty. But that means we need to fix the social systems in place that have caused this, at all levels. It doesn’t mean we can or should relax our standards for scientific evidence.
Because it is anecdotal. Your knowledge is absolutely true… for you. We have no way of knowing if it applies to anyone else, or why it’s true. Acupuncture is a good example. Many people report that it helps them. In a sense, they’ve experimented on themselves, trying several things and reporting the one that showed a result. Actual science has shown that acupuncture isn’t effective beyond a placebo. No one is doubting that acupuncture did help those people. It didn’t help them because sticking needles into people in specific places is helpful though. It helped them because they thought it would.
The same applies here. I have no issues with the hypothesis. I am completely open to the idea that microdosing is effective. This test isn’t, and shouldn’t, be considered scientific though. It fails all standards of rigor (again, unless I am misunderstanding an aspect of the test), results cannot be differentiated from a placebo, and it was done without blinding on a subject with a stake the results. The results of this project can’t be held to support the hypothesis. Nor would a null result of the study be grounds to reject the hypothesis. This project tells us nothing. Social issues are very real, very problematic, and we all need to work to solve them, inside the scientific community and outside, but they don’t transform bad data to good.
