I am an empiricist. For my own ailments, the track record has been:
Dr Google & Dr. Wikipedia: 4
GPs & Specialists: 1
And the one ailment that the system did successfully treat was primarily a result of misinformation that the system perpetuated. If the system were functioning, there would be no way for an amateur to outperform them so consistently.
edit: and since HN is slowposting me now:
I mentioned a study in my original comment:
https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.long
While this comment made no claim to being a study. It is highlighting an extreme improbability. If random taco cart guy is besting the average software dev 80% of the time, that's a pretty clear sign something is wrong with the field.
edit 2: and to joshuamorton
Mine was by a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and his research assistant, subsequently published in the British Medical Journal. Yours is a blog post by a "science communicator," whatever that is supposed to be. Of course the BMJ article would be widely criticized by an industry that claims almost 20% of US GDP. They can afford to have it criticized--by professional criticizers no less.
And the BMJ article is but one of many on the misrepresentations and oversellings of modern medicine. Read Ioannidis, or Mendelssohn, or Illich, or Mullins, or so many others!
As an old person, who has seen a lot of people cut short by the hospitals, all of these takedowns have held true to life. I've seen heart patients MRSA-ed to death by the hospitals, who would have been just fine if they stayed home; cancer patients killed off by post-radiation pleural effusion long before the cancer would have gotten them; people losing 1/3 of their blood volume, or suffering from intestinal perforations, from "routine" colonoscopies.
The primary contribution to human life expectancy in the last century was not mainstream medicine. It was public hygiene.