Yes, we are gullible! Someone showed me this voodoo with smoke, mirrors and magic and I simply believed it. Of course, when I got on the table and USED it, I felt even more gullible when the balls were dropping. Man, I'll believe anything that works...
All joking aside (really), you might find it interesting to go to, say, wikipedia, and have a look at some things like:
placebo, double-blind trial, or facilitated communication, in order to see the ENORMOUS difficulty people have had over CENTURIES in being able to DETERMINE "what works."
It turns out that it's very easy to be fooled about it.
The story of "facilitated communication" is one that especially has always fascinated me. I'll repeat the gist of it here:
Severely autistic kids can't communicate at all. One guy had the idea that maybe it was because they needed "help." That they weren't just totally pudding between the ears, and instead just couldn't speak, or couldn't sit still long enough to try to communicate what was on their minds.
So he trained people to GUIDE their hands over a typewriter while he asked the kids questions, and the facilitators (who held the kid's hands over the keyboard) "helped." Well, the kids started typing A LOT! And the kid's parents were ECSTATIC with being able to hear what their kids had to say--much of which was that they loved their parents
This was taken VERY SERIOUSLY by the psychology establishment. Hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of facilitators were trained, and found enormous satisfaction in helping these poor kids communicate, and giving great pleasure to their parents.
THEN, some smart ass came along and said: "Wait a minute! How could these kids have even learned to SPELL?" This facilitated communication stuff is bullshit!" So he did the simple test. He put a blinder between the kid and the facilitator, showed the kid apples, or books, or flowers, and asked the kid to type what he saw....and all of a sudden--if the facilitator couldn't see the object--the kid could no longer type what he saw (although he could type it just FINE if the facilitator could see it).
It was all PURE, SWEET, UNADULTERATED BULLSHIT.
Further research showed that almost all the facilitators actually had NO IDEA they were just typing whatever the hell they wanted to type! They were doing it and DIDN'T KNOW IT.
(I won't elaborate on the other part of the story that led to the whole thing becomming unwound: Some kids started reporting through their typing that they were being MOLESTED by their parents--in SATANIC RITUALS

)
So. Would you have recommended that communicated facilitation be continued--at great expense; training all those facilitators, etc.? The parents LOVED IT, They KNEW it worked. And OF COURSE, the facilitators themselves KNEW it worked! Everybody was HAPPY!