That's what I was trying to say. Anecdotes are the seeds of hypotheses, and enough anecdotes with well-understood conditions make a study population.
> Science is expensive and moves slow.
I don't know if I agree that science is slow. Certainly scientific consensus is slow though. The churn of ideas at the forefronts of fields is rapid. In my field (machine learning/statistics) I'd say too rapid/short term incentive focused.
I really take umbrage at the idea that science is some purely objective, ideal process. It's messy, and scientists are opinionated and stubborn. Some of the most obstinate people I've met are tenured professors... They kind of have to be. It takes time for good ideas to weather the initial criticisms, persist through replication and testing, and to take hold.
Science is slow for sure. You need to gather samples and run tests. Often testing for causality is impossible, because you literally need to "cause" the issue in your sample group and that raises ethical issues if the thing you're "causing" is harmful.
It's not even the human parts that are flawed with science either.
Science is fundamentally flawed by nature because in science and therefore reality as you know it you cannot prove anything to be true. You can only falsify things in science. Proof is the domain of mathematics.
Solely relying on anecdotes as evidence is not science, but they’re absolutely a critical part of it!