When I hear that scientific studies are untrustworthy, I ask "well... in comparison to what?"

I understand skepticism born of awful things like evidence being cherrypicked to support a study sponsor, at the expense of, you know, actual sick people. Ugh. But I also understand that while science doesn't resist these biases every time, other ways of learning about the world are usually even more subjective and biased.

I see other people make very binary decisions about this. "Science is always right!" Well, no, it's an iterative process, carried out by flawed human beings.

"Science is always wrong and changes its mind all the time!" Well, no, iPhones work as well as they did yesterday and they're chock full of bits that wouldn't work for beans unless gobs and gobs of science was correct to a tremendous degree. If you disagree, may I please have all your electronics and your car?

Science has the toughest time making accurate statements about big, complex, chaotic systems (like bodies) with lots of emergent behavior, with a lot of money on the line. It's challenging to eliminate both the "confounding factors" (everybody in the study was a bottle-fed white male) and the biases (the study was sponsored by Megafoodco). But nothing else is perfect under those circumstances either.