But the "hard" science generally needs a spark of intuition to help someone decide "maybe I should look into this", whether it's naive citizens positing that a certain practice/diet/supplement seems to help one of their conditions, or doctors noticing a pattern with a handful of their own cases, or researchers noticing something interesting but unexpected in vitro.

Again, most of these anecdotes don't pan out, but many do, and still today often against best-practice medical wisdom for systems we know less about.

The human body is massively complicated, and we're still just dipping our toes in a lot of new frontiers, and there are some areas which are very difficult to formally study.