Agreed. Both you and corrbrick make keen observations.

Statistics as a branch of mathematics traces back to Pascal. In its modern form it is about a century old and has become remarkably sophisticated. Starting with the early 20th century work of Fisher. So I do not agree with the original poster's point of view.

However, in the soft sciences, and most troubling of all in bio-medical research, the "p < 0.05" cult is a bad case of the statistical tail wagging the biological dog.

One hugely damaging consequence - as you point out - is that direct experience and observation is now routinely dismissed as merely anecdotal. That cuts off oxygen at the foundation of scientific investigation, inductive reasoning. As one wise commentator put it, the singular form of data is anecdote.

Sadly, in all stripes of physicians the "nothing but an anecdote" brain worm shuts down critical thinking when faced with tragedies such as SIDS, leads to officially sanctioned cover-ups, and gaslights the public on a horrendous scale. The "stomach sleeping" excuse for God's sake!

As an aside it is interesting to me that the group least prone to medical indoctrination are emergency room nurses. But they lack the institutional power to do anything about the vaccine injuries they experience streaming in from ambulances through the automatic sliding doors.

Also: the primacy of a statistics-first viewpoint has another very damaging effect. That is the subordination of causal-chain reasoning to random double-blind field trials. The medical establishment acts as though the effects of including aluminum and mercury and a laundry list of sketchy substances into vaccine adjuvants is completely unknown -- not until the results of (often manipulated) large scale double-blind fields trials roll in.

The rational is the opposite. Inclusion of known toxins? Guilty until proven innocent. Introduction of mRNA? Inclusion of spike proteins? Guilty until proven safe long-term with no accumulation in organs. Because the causality of bio-physics overrules treating humans as an ensemble of random variables.

Of course those of us on this board know that the whole medical system is corrupted and is run by very evil people. The Covid fix was in before it began. I'm just concentrating on the scientific perversion, here.