Reddit reviews Nadivijnana: The Crest-Jewel of Ayurveda: A Translation of Six Central Texts and an Examination of the Sources, Influence and Development of Indian Pulse-Diagnosis

Well, since Ayurveda was developed before the scientific method, certainly it is all based on "anecdote" or "case study."

However, I was referring mostly to the surgical procedures that had developed and were deliberately adopted by the West based on observation of indian practices at least thousand (or two) years after they were first used in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushruta_Samhita#Surgical_procedures_described

As well, though I haven't read the actual texts, I've been told that Charaka (I think it was) actually had a "germ theory" of disease to guide his development of antiseptic and hygienic practices more than 2,500 years ago: "diseases are caused by things 'too small to be seen' [and therefore need to be washed off of both patients and equipment]".

As far as specific Ayurvedic concoctions go, there's a very complicated system of "doshas" and "sub-doshas" etc that are supposed to be taken into account when prescribing plants and combinations of plants. While no doubt many preparations are flat out bad for you (which isn't too different than the ever-changing research results found in studies on modern medicine), there's still preparations that have remarkably consistent, and broad-band effects when tested using modern science. E.G., these two universal rasayanas are pretty darned amazing in their effects, at least on lab animals, even though they are meant for people to consume:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=maharishi+amrit+kalash


However, unlike the two preparations researched in the above studies, most Ayurvedic products are meant to be taken only by specific individuals, and very little modern research on Ayurveda takes that into account. The prakriti and vikriti divisions map almost perfectly in to "nature/nurture" or "genetic/epigenetic" divisions in modern biology, so, at least in principle, Ayurveda is far more sophisticated in how it prescribes things than Western medicine is because it is only in the past few years that Western medical practice even considered basing prescriptions on genetic and epigenetic factors.

Of course, you can argue that the doshic strategy for prescribing treatments and diets doesn't really work because it is too primitive and uncertain, but only recently have researchers attempted to see if there really ARE innate [genetic] properties in humans associated with the diagnosis of someone having a specific combination of doshas and sub-doshas:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=ayurvedic+(vatta+OR+pita+OR+kapha)+genetic

so the jury is out there, as well.

...

One problem about trying to understand the history of the development of Ayurveda is that, while there are a few important documents central to the system, modern tradition combines many different sources in ways that didn't exist when those documents were written.

For example, my own "guru" Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spearheaded an effort to "revive" Ayurveda starting around 1980, and for him one of the most sophisticated and important technologies (after his "Transcendental Meditation") was the art of pulse diagnosis. It turns out that pulse diagnosis was almost unknown by the authors of the major Ayurvedic texts and is actually a transplant from another system

http://www.amazon.com/Nadivijnana-Crest-Jewel-Translation-Examination-Pulse-Diagnosis/dp/3639306732

There is virtually no research on the utility of such a practice, and what little there is, suggests that it aint very useful.

However, since it is a practice that is supposed to take thousands of hours to master and is completely internal with no feedback possible, as is the case with meditation, the initial instruction is conceivably all-important as far as the results that are gained, so studies done on how reliable pulse diagnosis is, yield random results possibly because random practitioners trained in random schools were used as subjects.

Quality control of teachers arguably is all-important when training what is essentially a mental practice.


Any way, just some ramblings. The biggest problems with studying Ayurveda scientifically are:

1. practitioners are very biased [often VERY biased] so they make poor researchers;
   
   
2. independent researchers often don't understand what they are studying well enough to devise studies that take into account the personalized nature of most Ayurvedic treatments -not only does one-size NOT fit all in ayurveda, but by Ayurvedic tradition, something that is good for one subject due to their doshic nature might be bad for another, so taking a random group of people and testing their reaction to some arbitrary ayurvedic preparation is pretty much guaranteed to generate a null-finding from an ayurvedic perspective as Ayurveda would predict that the positive and detrimental effects would average out or even be skewed to the detrimental in some cases.
   
   
   
   
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   Just rambling, but I hope I've convinced you that Ayurveda may not be as uniformly worthless as most people in this forum assume it must be, because it isn't "scientific."