My sons and I have Science degrees, and we were fond of "Skeptics Corner" in Scientific American. One day, we decided to do a skeptics treatment of "Skeptics Corner" and decided that...skeptics were too skeptical.

I sometimes research and write on medical subjects. As you say, there is much medical disinformation out there, and big med/pharma mostly firewalls. Some (like chiropractors) are maybe 75% BS, but Kaiser appropriately gives members a 20% chiropractor copay. Lest patients with depression/anxiety may go down the mental health rabbit-hole, Kaiser sends them to "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy", which is basically learning to get your shit together.

I get Nature and Science magazines and read the latest research. Much of it is not quite aligned with big med/pharma (which seem to have a mainstream and profit aligned approach to health). The big takeaways are that diet, exercise, lifestyle may be 70% preventatives (something big med/pharma doesn't always tell you), and that there are some off-label things that work, that big med/pharma won't exactly mention, plus big med/pharma "interventions" of little value.

Examples might be Sildenafil (which has a growing list of off-label uses, mostly discovered by word on the street), and things like marginally efficacious statins, stents, and glandular/intestinal probings.

https://medium.com/p/cabef2424342

https://medium.com/p/6c885ff6d767

https://medium.com/p/c93970379888

https://medium.com/p/751972447fbf

My rules:

1) Diet, exercise, clean living are first line of defense

2) Avoid disinformation and quackery by non-reputable or non-certified entities (but this goes for all news of that type, including political)

3) Big med/pharma successes are antibiotics, vaccines, MRIs, laparoscopic methods, safe surgeries, etc, but is Big Med/Pharma hiding its own minor form of quackery?