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Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...

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.

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