science is not infallible

I can't understand how many very educated people, and even more surprisingly, many very skeptical people have implausible faith in doctors and/or too much confidence in scientific theory. That is, they believe in spite of the fact that scientific and medical findings are constantly being proved wrong. Why be less skeptical of scientific conclusions than of anything else?

Scientists reverse their conclusions about lactic acid:

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.

But that, it turns out, is all wrong.

And in support of intuitive thinking as opposed to basing belief on hard facts: Coaches didn’t know the science behind lactic acid, but from intuition knew what worked:

Through trial and error, coaches learned that athletic performance improved when athletes worked on endurance, running longer and longer distances, for example.

That, it turns out, increased the mass of their muscle mitochondria, letting them burn more lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer.

And the scientists?

They took much longer to figure it out.