He's not an 'accurate historian' in the modern sense, and you certainly shouldn't 'trust and follow' any historian unquestioningly, let alone Herodotus. He wasn't accurate about the existence of giant gold-digging ants bigger than foxes (Histories 3.102), for example, and even in the classical world there was a good deal of doubt about his other narratives (Cicero, for example, says in his Laws that there are a 'countless number of legends' in Herodotus' work).

He was the first historian, however -- at least the first whose works have come down to us -- so it's a bit unfair to hold him to modern standards of accuracy. In many ways Herodotus marks a bridging point between Greek myth and the Homeric style of legendary epic on the one hand and the more 'modern' historical style of someone like Thucydides (who actually lived fairly close in time to him) on the other. Herodotus's Histories move seamlessly between myth and historical narrative. He often makes reference to the supernatural, and draws on legends about the heroic age.

So if you're looking for accurate history, Herodotus might not always be your best bet. That doesn't mean he's useless as a historical source -- there's a lot of good historical information to be gleaned from the Histories. But it's a complicated task, and we definitely can't just trust and follow him.

For more on this check out the compilation Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus which was published a few years ago, and has a lot of interesting detail on how we should understand Herodotus.