Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's disturbing. I suspect most of this community would be anti-anti-vax (pro-vax?). And if one were to suggest on this forum that "I vaccinated my child and they got autism, therefore vaccines cause autism", they would be met with the appropriate skepticism. But in this thread people are professing "I had acupuncture and got better, therefore acupuncture works" and somehow that's considered defensible.
"Anecdotal" is not the correct term. "Testimonial" is. People are relaying the truth they observed, which is testimony. Anecdote means more along the lines of hearsay, or repeating something from a third party as if it were testimonial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
> Anecdotal evidence is evidence from anecdotes, i.e., evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony. When compared to other types of evidence, anecdotal evidence is generally regarded as limited in value due to a number of potential weaknesses, but may be considered within the scope of scientific method as some anecdotal evidence can be both empirical and verifiable, e.g. in the use of case studies in medicine. Other anecdotal evidence, however, does not qualify as scientific evidence, because its nature prevents it from being investigated by the scientific method.
> Where only one or a few anecdotes are presented, there is a larger chance that they may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.[1][2] Similarly, psychologists have found that due to cognitive bias people are more likely to remember notable or unusual examples rather than typical examples.[3] Thus, even when accurate, anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative of a typical experience. Accurate determination of whether an anecdote is "typical" requires statistical evidence.[4] Misuse of anecdotal evidence is an informal fallacy and is sometimes referred to as the "person who" fallacy ("I know a person who..."; "I know of a case where..." etc.) which places undue weight on experiences of close peers which may not be typical. Compare with hasty generalization.