Unfortunately many people claim an absence of evidence _without_a_thorough_search_ is evidence of absence. As in "I have haven't seen it so it must not exist". Many people who are experts do this. There needs to be some new terminology here, just saying "there is no evidence" is meaningless, people need to start saying "there is no evidence after <these> kinds of searches" to qualify their statements. Like "I haven't seen any evidence, but I haven't really looked", or "I asked some of my collegues and none had seen any relevant papers", or "I did a PubMed search and found no papers on that topic", or "I did a PubMed search and found 10 low quality studies that showed no evidence of that". Otherwise it is completely reasonable to interpret "there is no evidence" as "I don't know".