You may have heard of the Dunning Kruger Effect?
It describes how your confidence to speak about something increases as you gain competence.
But, noticeably, when you start to gain competence, your confidence can spike way too high too soon out of proportion with your experience and expertise, placing you atop "Mount Stupid". Then, as you gain more competence, you can descend into the "Valley Of Despair" as you realise there's a lot more to your field than you had thought.
Descending into the valley of despair can be marked by embarrassment on how you've been holding forth with strong opinions, stridently preaching to the world with way too much self-assurance.
After shooting my mouth off on LinkedIn regarding issues in modern day science, and understandably drawing a fair degree of pushback from people engaged in research for their day job, I have become personally acquainted with Mount Stupid.
Pete O'Sullivan (Physiotherapist - Body Logic & Curtin University), who's a personal friend plus one of my online adversaries & interlocutors on this issue - kindly agreed to have a chat about his own perspective as an active researcher.
This discussion with Pete provides his perspective on the trustworthiness of modern empirical research in allied health.
It resulted in an increase in my own confidence that contemporary research published in high quality peer reviewed journals can be trusted.