Turmeric has been used in India since ancient times. There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects. Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee). So, expect more things to come out from the research of Western labs, knowledge that is common to most grandmothers in India for ages. But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do & nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects.
Side fact: An American company tried to patent turmeric & almost got away with it. This had to be fought by the Indian government to prevent (or nullify) the patent application.
>There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects.
Homeopathy also has zero side effects (apart from having zero effects). There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. The vast majority is pseudo-scientific nonsense that should be rejected.
>Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee).
All of those are known to the entire world, both their exaggerated benefits and their limitations. Sorry to burst your bubble.
>But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do &
You are severely confused. Do you take coconut oil when you get cancer? Or do you take Turmeric? If you get liver disease do you use copper vessels? Nobody cares where the idea originated. When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results.
> nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects.
That doesn't explain the success of pseudo-scientific products marketed under the "Patanjali" brand.
Also, there is no such thing as "Western science". Its a global science and people from around the world are contributing to it. Go into any research lab in the "west". You'll find a large portion of people there belonging to chinese and south asian heritage apart from the local ethnic majority.
You're making some very, very broad, blanket statements about vast swaths of human experience and recorded wisdom (hint: that usually doesn't work out so well - nuance is our friend!).
But, to play along, in attempt to affirm or deny this - let's start with what you mean by "those texts". Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
edit:
you know what? I'll help you out with a single counterexample to your statement, so that we can move on:
To summarize, the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
There's plenty more examples like this; I will end my confrontation of your current system of beliefs here. The rest of this form of work is completely up to you!
>You're making some very, very broad, blanket statements about vast swaths of human experience and recorded wisdom (hint: that usually doesn't work out so well - nuance is our friend!).
I don't know about you, but when I read about applying dung into my wounds, I kinda lose interest in the remaining 4000 pages, and also happily forgo the 'ward off evil spirits' bonus that it brings.
>Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
Your paraphrasing is out of context. I am speaking about medical knowledge. Our knowledge has improved, but our flaws still remain. In other non-medical contexts, a lot of things would still apply.
Back to your counter point.
>the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
While that maybe be what is being reported it is not even close to the truth. The texts don't say "here's how to treat malaria". They don't even know what malaria actually is or how it works or anything about it. Traditional medicine applied a 'throw shit to the wall' approach (common in ancient times) to treat fevers using hundreds of different herbs. None of these actually worked, because there was no knowledge of what was causing those fevers (parasite/virus/disease etc). This is also why we don't treat malaria by giving someone a cup of herbal tea - it doesn't work.
What was a world record for a marathon a hundred years ago is barely the qualifying time for the Boston marathon in 2018. So yeah, The Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, etc all had their own world records. Its time to let them go. I prefer to take my medical science from the time when we know the most about the human body, not when we knew the least. You can make your own choice.
Knowledge is everywhere, science doesn't tell you to be narrow minded. If you deny human kind's past experiences, you would just end up reinventing the wheel. It is always hard to find the reason behind anything as it requires us to find the pattern first. Call it symptoms in medical science. Human kind has been doing it since its inception. Ancient texts are just there to help you out. Remember that there were no technological advancements as of today, still our ancestors had found reasons and solutions (cures in medical science) to many problems. You do not need to really trust anything, but what I am saying is that you cannot also simply deny it.
>When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results.
Isn't that exactly what you are disputing?
I think we have to allow for the possibility that some of the correlations identified over thousands of years may actually be real.
I would never follow any of that advice, because I agree that the scientific process we have today is vastly superior and supercedes traditional medicine.
"Try things and see what works" wasn't invented yesterday though. That's why people were successfully using citrus fruits against scurvy long before double blind trials became a thing.
Yeah 'some' of those 'correlations' might also involve sourcing crocodile dung [1]. Or maybe you prefer cutting open a vein and draining some blood when you feel sick? [2]
The qualifying time for the Boston Marathon today, was a world record 100 years ago. So yeah, maybe these remedies were 'world records' in their time. But now, we have advanced, and they're sub-par and often times downright dangerous.
But how do you actually know if these Ayurvedic practices work without the rigorous trial and error that "Western" science demands? Unless I'm mistaken, the Ayurvedic texts do not contain repeatable evidence of the efficacy of the treatments described within them, nor do they describe plausible explanations of how those treatments work.
Whatever truths are contained in Ayurvedic texts are accidental unless they were arrived at by some sort of experimentation, and they're mixed in with a lot of nonsense which "Western" science is attempting to sift through. Along with proving the potency of some Ayurvedic treatments, science is also DISproving that of many others, which means that it's not "catching up" with Ayurvedic so much as catching it, shining a bright light on it, and asking it much tougher questions than anybody thought to ask before.
I think you are quite mistaken. The ayurvedic or any of the sciences of ancient Indians use the same trail & error methodologies of modern science. Why should it be any different? A lot of the texts have already been lost, thanks to time, the British & Muslim rule in India.
I don't agree there are accidental truths. In India we have been following these for thousands of years. They were not exposed to the Western world, maybe because of the prejudice of religion, obscurity etc & also the belief that something of virtue is rarely possible in an Eastern civilization like India.
What ones have been disproven? If any, Western sciences have been building up on some of what were already discovered & documented. Also, I did not mean to insult anyone by saying that they are trying to "catch up". I feel at least some of what we are discovering nowadays are repeat discoveries of the Eastern / Indian / Vedic world, not because the Vedic people were smarter, but only because they have had a much much longer civilizational presence than any other. Even this longevity of Vedic civilization has not yet been "discovered" fully by the Western world.
> The ayurvedic or any of the sciences of ancient Indians use the same trail & error methodologies of modern science.
Then please show us the studies, and the reproductions. As you said, "Why should it be any different?", and verification via repeatably reproducing results is how science works.
> the British & Muslim rule in India.
That's a bit of off-topic attack that serves no purpose to your argument. If you were trying to make the argument the texts would have been preserved if India had been entirely under Hindu rule, well, that's an entirely different argument that does not validate an "Ayurveda works" claim. In short: "The dog ate my thesis" does not work.
> In India we have been following these for thousands of years.
As have been a lot of rituals and traditions that have been proven to hold no (or worse, negative) benefit. Age serves as a poor proxy for legitimacy.
The OP comment strikes me as having a rather jingoistic/nationalistic tone, so I sort of doubt its sincerity regarding question of efficacy of Ayurvedic practices.
Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
> Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
How is that different from science? That is great & is science. Maybe you do not recall the recent news about how Radium painting was also science. All this is science, especially the Ayurvedic sciences. What else is it?
It is different in important ways from the modern scientific method [1].
In particular, it omits (or has long since stopped):
- Developing testable (falsifiable) predictions
- Gathering data to test the predictions
- Refining, Altering, Expanding, or Rejecting Hypotheses
Modern science is actively doing all those things: constantly re-evaluating its own prior conclusions and testing against the most recent empirical data available.
Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
Other than the part that it has long since stopped or highly slowed down due to various reasons, why would the others be any different in Ayurveda. It is just medical science called by a different name. Now mankind's prejudice has made many shun it & discredit it again & again while at the same time digesting it & copying it to use a different name in order to credit someone else. There are many evidences for such copying, because not only are the good parts copied, but also the mistakes in the ancient Vedic sciences are copied by the people who want to discredit it because they attribute this cultural development to Hindu pagan religion — this while historically true has worked to encourage mankind to shun it even now. The copying of the mistakes are what gives away this dishonesty.
> Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
That is true for everything, that is how science works today at least. Even scientific theories are tested again & again, just to prove them wrong. If they are proved wrong, then that is a great accomplishment, but how can they be proven wrong if they are not tested? Same with Ayurveda, it is just science with a different name.
The problem is it's hard to make money off of those things. There's strong evidence suggesting papaya seeds are remarkably good for purging parasites from the digestive system -- but why research it further when you can push Albendazole for $400/treatment?
You see a lot of turmeric and a ton of other spices and herbs in SE Asian cooking too. But I really wouldn’t say that these populations are particularly healthier.
The idea that modern medicine is ‘playing catch-up’ is laughable. For every home remedy they get right, they probably get many others wrong.
That's not a useful avenue -- you have no control group. We can't compare people from India who eat a lot of curry to people from the US who don't: there are a million differences in diet, lifestyle, genetics, and environment that make it impossible to draw a conclusion about how it affects memory.
Your example is a good one actually: we know Japanese men are less prone to heart disease, but we don't conclusively know why. We can guess it's related to certain factors, e.g. fish consumption, but we can't know just by comparing the two cultures.
Japan has a very close relationship to Vedic sciences. This has been established since ancient times. Look at their gods for example, almost all are 1:1 Vedic/Hindu gods - Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kuber, Shiva, Yama etc.
> For every home remedy they get right, they probably get many others wrong.
Ayurveda & any Vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences, if not more. You're are grossly mistaken if you think Ayurveda is a "home remedy".
"rigorous" in science, especially biomedical sciences, has a specific definition. Where is the double-blind testing? Where is the statistical significance? Where are the clinical trials?
Ayurveda likely has a lot to offer as a FOUNDATION to start doing investigative research; but this claim of "any vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences" is bunkum. Show me any statistics / clinical trial data (or its equivalent) in the vedas?
I will accept & agree with the idea / contention that a lot of the treatments in ayurveda are possibly based on strong observations & correlations. Which is a good place to start modern scientific research from.
But to claim that ayurveda as written in, for instance, the Atharva Veda, is rigorous science demonstrates to me, a rather stark, depressing & baffling ignorance of modern science.
It is clear that you have not even read the Vedas to understand its implications on the world, especially in science. Most of the statistics that you ask have been lost due to them being so old, or deliberately destroyed. But we have the results to prove that these existed. "Strong observations & correlations" are just another way of saying "trial & errors".
Not just ayurveda, but take any science or even Mathematics. The Vedic civilization has been too far ahead of its European counterparts. In fact the idea of heliocentrism, gravity, action=reaction, universe & its age, speed of light, distance of the sun & moon from earth, understanding of time travel, time zones, metallurgy, the so called pythagoras theorem, sudoku & its various forms, the numeral system etc etc all have Indian/Vedic origins, so why would you doubt vedic medical sciences so much? There is also substantial evidence for surgery to have developed in Vedic India far earlier than Hippocrates or any Western counterpart. I firmly believe that if not for the muslim hordes who destroyed everything under the pretext of war, mankind would have been able to make better use of mankind's ancestral knowledge.
Look, you obviously have an axe to grind. And you are conflating too many different things.
So I'll limit myself to the original point.
Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Evidence in this case is statistics and data. Those are not present, from many reasons (as an aside, I don't think there is any evidence of statistical trials being performed in the Vedas).
There is no work in medicine in the Vedas that satisfies this criteria. Ergo, it is not yet evidence based science. It's observational. Now, if the govt. through AYUSH [AYUSH added in edit] actually invests in performing clinical trials etc. and publishing them in peer reviewed journals, then your argument may hold water. You are conflating correlations with causation / evidence.
> Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Can be reworded as: "Science, particularly Vedic science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based." The vedas are not any different than any sciences that mankind honestly developed. Only, it goes far beyond what we (aka modern science) are/is able to comprehend, about the consciousness of the universe etc. With time, that will also be rediscovered. Also not to take away anything from modern science, many things have been discovered & invented far more than Vedic sciences. My problem is treating the Vedas as purely a religious book like the Bible & Quran and neglecting the great expanse of knowledge in it.
Now you are shifting the goalposts. This is what I am alluding to when I say, conflating multiple things.
Who, in this comment chain, is making any point about Vedas being purely religious? That is not apposite to this discussion.
The Vedas are a work of knowledge. In philosophy, in natural sciences. There is a strong argument to be made that they capture large parts of the essence of scientific temperament, which is analysis, refection & observation. But, modern scientific research is not just scientific temperament.
Practicing science, modern science, also requires evidence & follows a hypothesis-driven model that makes testable & provable / disprovable predictions.
You seem to be eager to misinterpret OR re-interpret terms to suit your perspective / point of view. "Evidence" based has a specific meaning. This [1] is a reasonable definition of what evidence based medicine means TODAY.
The vedas provide observations. They record correlations (perhaps). That's not evidence!
Lots of work has been lost; that's not unique to the Indian subcontinent. The library of Alexandria was lost. Many of Plato's works are lost. What does that have to do with modern science apart from regret & grief at what was lost?
I think you've misunderstood evidence based medicine as end-all, be-all of scientific analysis & only restricted to modern science. It is quite natural & largely common sense. Agreed, it is the gold standard for today, but it may not be so in the future, something else will come & upend that too as it always happens with scientific development. Remember Radium painting, that was also part of evidence-based medicine. By that account the Ayurvedic science has had fewer mishaps than science as practiced in modern times. Science is always about trial & error, my point is that it was not different from the times of ayurveda. This is as opposed to the biblical or quranic words of god, not the same thing at all.
Also, it is fair to say that Indian ancient texts have suffered significantly more destruction than others due to religious persecution and genocides against a peaceful civilization. The genocides are especially important because most information was transferred through word of mouth.
Ayurvedic medicine is far from infallible. Take this for instance, a selection from a reasonably popular Ayurvedic text (https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauh...) that is aimed at a general audience and purports to explain the health benefits of various common foods (my translation follows):
> कैंसर: कैंसर में पहले तीन दिन रोगी को उपवास कराएं, फिर अंगूर सेवन कराना आरम्भ करें। कभी-कभी एनिमा लगाएं। एक दिन में दो किलो से अधिक अंगूर न खिलाएं। कुछ दिन पश्चात छाछ पीने को दी जा सकती है। अन्य कोई चीज़ खाने को न दें। इससे लाभ धीरे-धीरे महीनों में होता है। इसकी पुल्टिस घावों पर लगा सकते हैं। इस रोग की चिकित्सा में कभी-कभी अंगूर का रस लेने से पेट-दर्द मलद्वार पर जलन होती है। इससे डरना नहीं चाहिए। दर्द कुछ दिनों में ठीक हो जाता है। दर्द होने पर सेक कर सकते हैं।
> Cancer: for cancer, have the patient fast for three days, then begin their intake of grapes. Perform enemas intermittently. Don't feed the patient more than two kilos of grapes in a day. After a few days, buttermilk may be given for drinking. Do not provide anything else to drink. In the next few months, an improvement will slowly be noted. A poultice may be applied to their wounds. In the course of the treatment of this disease, the intake of grape juice will occasionally cause stomachaches and a burning sensation on the anus. This is no cause for concern. The pain will subside in a few days. Compressions may be given to alleviate the pain.
You could argue that such obvious quackery has also been peddled by Western doctors who are trained in the scientific method. That is true, but at least these doctors' manuscripts wouldn't be accepted by any reputable journal. Admittedly I'm not sure how the Ayurvedic medical community organizes itself in India, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't place so much emphasis on the scientific method, and you also imply this in your comment.
A less extreme example of what's found in the book, a remedy for diabetes using bitter gourd juice:
> मधुमेह: रोगी को १५ ग्राम करेले का रस सौ ग्राम पानी में मिलाकर नित्य तीन बार करीब तीन महीने पिलाना चाहिए। खाने में भी करेले की सब्ज़ी लें।
> Diabetes: Have the patient drink 15 grams of bitter gourd juice in 100 grams of water 3 times daily continuously for three months. They should also eat cooked bitter gourd.
I think you'd agree that the remedy above isn't as good a treatment for diabetes as an insulin regimen--the one prescribed, by the way, by Western medicine.
In summary, there's no doubt that traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine have discovered legitimate remedies, but it seems like they generally prescribe a large number of false positive treatments. And if you also believe that the scientific method is the best epistemological apparatus that humans have found so far, then you should be skeptical of these remedies until they have been clinically demonstrated to be effective.
I did not claim it to be infallible, nobody does. It is a science, on equal footing with any other science. It followed the same rigorous trial & error procedures that is required of all sciences. And science does gets things wrong. Ayurveda roughly translates to the knowledge / science of health. Just because it is from India & it follows Hindu traditions does not disqualify it from anything.
I'm going to chime in to the growing chorus of HNers trying to explain to you why you're wrong.
There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
Agreed that there is no "any other science". But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify. The reasons for this prejudice are too many, but it has a religious angle, an angle that the Church has pushed for too long that people have forgotten any other angle. Also the angle of Islamic destruction, which has ensured that most texts & documentation are destroyed under the pretext of war & iconoclasm. Please see my other comments.
> But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify.
What, exactly, are you talking about here? It'd be better if you could cite examples.
So let me get this straight, if I have a Muslim last name I can't claim any attachment or heritage to Ayurveda even if my family uses it and we've been in the subcontinent for 500 years?
There are 3 kind of logic systems 4 corners(chatuskoti), 3 corners(trikoti), 2 corners( binary logic). Entire western civilization is build top of binary logic. Only one god, america has friends(5 eyes) and enemies but no nutral parties(there are occasional cat paws ).
From western binary logic they can't even explain zero(mathematically). One reason is science is not global thing it's creation of given culture(In current case western culture). Because western main philosophy is binary one and as per there binary logic they thing there are only one science. And since west control the world for half millennia and still control the world they teach us there are only one global/universal science. example if you change Euclid's main assumptions you get entirely different geometry. In some comments says that ayurved is joke or useless fact is I know(and probably OP know's) it can cure series illnesses like cansces/diabetic and etc.
Trying to understand ayurvedic methods using modern western apothecary teaching is absolutely useless.
Ayurvedic theory (5 elements etc...) is usless compared to modern science, so much that I dare to say it is wrong...
Does it have predictive (and thus real explanatory) power?
Imagine a test (other similar tests can be imagined):
give some powder to a western chemist/biologist and an ayurvedic to examine its "elements". You are not allowed to feed it to any human or animal. Decide if it is poisonous! Who will be more successful?
Ayurveda knows nothing about modern chemisrty or biology (real elements, cells,...), its theory part is rubish (from the perspective of natural science not from social science perspective (history, philosophy...) of course).
You may trust its experimental results, but that is not science in itself just a tradition...
Side fact: An American company tried to patent turmeric & almost got away with it. This had to be fought by the Indian government to prevent (or nullify) the patent application.