Reddit reviews The Roots of Ayurveda (Penguin Classics)

> Ok, so Mr. WittyOriginalName...you and Azdahak have a serious axe to grind apparently against Ayurveda. I noticed that nowhere in your post is there any mention of your actually having tried it for yourself though.

A great many things feel good. A great many things elicit a placebo or other response. This is why the scientific method is so helpful and has changed the course of history so very much in the last few centuries.

> First of all, you know nothing about Ayurveda from what I can tell. I have an Ayurvedic physician that I have been seeing for years now, and I've been using Ayurveda myself for far longer than that.

Cool! People rode horses for centuries to go hither and yon. Clearly horses and cars are just as good at getting people from here to there.

> Second of all, you say "science" is superior, and "we have the scientific method" and they didn't in the past. That's false. The scientific method is just empiricism in a nutshell.

No. And you may be a computer science researcher but computer science research doesn't employ the scientific method, with which you aren't familiar. To even present that you are a computer science researcher as though it imbues some air of authority regarding the scientific method is all the indication we need that you don't understand the latter. I may not be in research but I have bachelors in both comp sci and a field which does employ the scientific method... this also hardly makes me an expert but I know the difference between the two types of "science" well enough. The scientific method isn't just "measure stuff". It is precisely concerned with narrowing down EXACTLY what's causing an effect.

> But in reality, it is impossible to quantify the effect of food and herbs on the body.

Oh ok so how do you explain modern medicine then? How is it that we are now able to keep HIV positive people alive for decades for example? Are they rubbing oils on their feet? Eating herbs, with unknown concentrations of substances?

> There are thousands of different compounds in plants, and they interact in a synergistic fashion. That's why the effectiveness of vitamins when consumed in a whole food is almost always significantly higher than taking them in supplement form.

Point me to studies using large populations where this approach is more effective. Oh... that's awkward... Shouldn't there be an empirically quantifiable effect? Re vitamins in foods, why must it only be due to this synergy? Please point me to empirical data which clearly implicates this synergy in all cases, as opposed to simply activating metabolic processes activated by say fiber, or the act of eating itself. We do have some evidence that taking vitamins, and indeed many supplements with food slows down absorption and gets them around the body more. Perhaps you are aware that when you eat you increase bloodflow to the stomach, precisely to take those digested nutrients and spread them around the body.... among other things. Many drugs are more effective when taken with food.

This is exactly the problem with "empirical thinking" in the absence of controlled methods as employed in the execution of the scientific method: it's far too easy to make assumptions which seem to support ones world view. Especially when it is emotionally rewarding to support that worldview "Oh if I follow god/the universes will, I will live longer AND I get to believe that life is ultimately not meaningless?!?!!? Obviously the data points to that conclusion..." :-|

> The only way to observe what works and what doesn't is through generations of trial-and-error and observation, and that's all Ayurveda has done. It's accumulated wisdom.

Oh right that's why bloodletting persisted as a practice for so many centuries. That's why it was so hard to convince midwives to wash their hands before performing surgery. Accumulated wisdom.

> As I pointed out to Azdahak not too long ago, 80% of India uses Ayurveda in one way or another. The NIH spends about 1% of its budget on preventive medicine. Ayurveda is all about prevention. That's why it's called the science of longevity. Think about what you're saying here, because it's a very tall claim.

I mentioned in one of my posts ITT that western societies need to invest more in preventative medicine, and it is something I think most/all are working towards. The healthiest populations in the world rely primarily on western medicine AND preventative care.

People in the US, who isn't a top ranker, live about 12 years longer on average. How do we separate all the different factors? Is it parasitic diseases and the like from lack of sanitation which makes up the difference? Is it vaccines/antibiotics/anti-parasitics/chemotherapy/advanced surgical intervention/etc, which were created utilizing the principles of western medicine, as established and vetted via the scientific method? Is it a focus on preventative medicine (which we haven't even defined for the purposes of this conversation)? Should we wait generations to figure it out?

> You're essentially saying in characteristic skeptical ENTP fashion that for around 1500 years (that's how long Ayurveda has been codified, but it was probably being used for far longer than that simply as an oral tradition), every single generation was delusional and misguided in passing on what they knew to the next generation.

Not delusional. Ignorant. Ignorant as fuck. As I would have been were I not educated in the scientific method.

I was raised Jewish. In Judaism you aren't supposed to mix milk and meat. It turns out that using the same un coated dishes (wood/ceramic) for both breeds some serious super concentrations of life threatening bacteria. "God" told my people that mixing milk and meat was a bad idea. Now we know why and I can eat cheeseburgers afaic because that wisdom was trumped by actual understanding.

> I'm afraid that the burden of proof is on you to conclusively demonstrate that bioscience is more effective than Ayurveda in every respect.

No it really isn't. The cool thing about science is that things need to be "proven" to be accepted as true. It's not a contest of ideologies or traditions or national/cultural pride, or anything but "if you make a claim you have to prove it". As Ayurveda claims to heal people in various ways, every way that it claims to heal people needs to be proven. It also claims that bodies and medicine work along a theoretical framework which doesn't stand up to anything but the personal beliefs and claims of adherents and supporters. You are trying to make them equivalent but one system for understanding how shit works has proven to be far more effective. Western medicine grew out of that system. While there may be useful information and approaches in other systems, and while western medicine certainly doesn't have all the answers, the process for understanding the world (the sci method) is unarguably more effective.

> Do your homework. Do your research. It takes 8 years to become an Ayurvedic physician in India. It's very difficult to study the effectiveness of Ayurvedic therapies using RCTs. Science has only just begun to scratch the surface. Just because scam artists abound, especially here in America, does not mean you get to write off an entire body of knowledge as quackery.

It takes 8 years to learn all sorts of shit. What is an "RCT" by the way?

> Come back here when you know more.

Haha come back here when you can empirically prove that Ayurvedic therapies are more effective than science based approaches. Personally I'll go with whatever has the best evidence of efficacy. If you get cancer what are you going to go with?

> If you want to know what Ayurveda is really about, read this guy's book. He is one of the foremost western Sanskrit grammarians: https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Ayurveda-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140448241 And this is a good summary of the concept of physical constitutions to get you started: http://aysnyc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=202&Itemid=165

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_medicine

Ok, so Mr. WittyOriginalName...you and Azdahak have a serious axe to grind apparently against Ayurveda. I noticed that nowhere in your post is there any mention of your actually having tried it for yourself though.

First of all, you know nothing about Ayurveda from what I can tell. I have an Ayurvedic physician that I have been seeing for years now, and I've been using Ayurveda myself for far longer than that.

Second of all, you say "science" is superior, and "we have the scientific method" and they didn't in the past. That's false. The scientific method is just empiricism in a nutshell. What you really mean to say is that we have reductionism and fancy instruments to analyze very small things. But in reality, it is impossible to quantify the effect of food and herbs on the body. I'm a computer science researcher, and this problem is intractable without quantum computing or some other paradigm shift in the field. There are thousands of different compounds in plants, and they interact in a synergistic fashion. That's why the effectiveness of vitamins when consumed in a whole food is almost always significantly higher than taking them in supplement form. The only way to observe what works and what doesn't is through generations of trial-and-error and observation, and that's all Ayurveda has done. It's accumulated wisdom.

As I pointed out to Azdahak not too long ago, 80% of India uses Ayurveda in one way or another. The NIH spends about 1% of its budget on preventive medicine. Ayurveda is all about prevention. That's why it's called the science of longevity. Think about what you're saying here, because it's a very tall claim. You're essentially saying in characteristic skeptical ENTP fashion that for around 1500 years (that's how long Ayurveda has been codified, but it was probably being used for far longer than that simply as an oral tradition), every single generation was delusional and misguided in passing on what they knew to the next generation. I'm afraid that the burden of proof is on you to conclusively demonstrate that bioscience is more effective than Ayurveda in every respect.

Do your homework. Do your research. It takes 8 years to become an Ayurvedic physician in India. It's very difficult to study the effectiveness of Ayurvedic therapies using RCTs. Science has only just begun to scratch the surface. Just because scam artists abound, especially here in America, does not mean you get to write off an entire body of knowledge as quackery. Come back here when you know more.

If you want to know what Ayurveda is really about, read this guy's book. He is one of the foremost western Sanskrit grammarians:
https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Ayurveda-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140448241
And this is a good summary of the concept of physical constitutions to get you started:
http://aysnyc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=202&Itemid=165