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Comment by frequentnapper | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't put much stock in Ayurveda or even worse, Traditional Chinese Medicine, except some of the treatments which have been proven to work. There's a reason why western medicine is superior - it follows evidence-based modern scientific and research principles, not hogwash.

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Always brings me back to the line from Storm by Tim Minchin "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? Medicine."

Instead of “western” medicine, I prefer to call it “evidence based, tested with randomized controlled experiments, mechanism of action deduced” medicine. No data, no medicine.

Even then, medicine is super hard since there is so much complexity in the human body and variations across populations, and experiments are extremely costly.

Yes, that's what I meant. The article was blaming western medicine and the comparisons are often made between eastern and western medicine - western referring to the current mainstream approach.

The current mainstream approach of western medicine does not follow this - eg. there is little evidence that anti-depression drugs actually cure depression, and the side-effects are horrible. Yet the pharma industry profits greatly by selling snake oil that just makes people more sick.

[citation needed]

>Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain. Indeed, their supposed effectiveness is the primary evidence for the chemical imbalance theory. But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect. Some antidepressants increase serotonin levels, some decrease it, and some have no effect at all on serotonin. Nevertheless, they all show the same therapeutic benefit. Even the small statistical difference between antidepressants and placebos may be an enhanced placebo effect, due to the fact that most patients and doctors in clinical trials successfully break blind. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

They do seem to work for some people. If you are in that group, they are a good deal. Unfortunately a lot of people are not helped by them or find the side effects too hard to deal with.

>Instead of “western” medicine, I prefer to call it “evidence based, tested with randomized controlled experiments, mechanism of action deduced” medicine

If that's the definition, then there are zero psychiatric drugs that can be classified as western "medicine", as we have yet to understand how drugs like anti-depressants intercourse with the mind ("the mechanism of action deduced").

"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances

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

Yes, mechanism of action is an ideal, but not attainable yet with current technology. Of course, we have to make do with what we have, and there is higher probabilities of errors with medicines which we don't understand the mechanism of action.

"western" as opposed to what? Isn't scientific medicine practiced in Japan? Or Australia? Russia?

It's a very odd use of the world "western"...

I have to double this comment. I understand that this is shorthand for "Medicine developed by following the scientific process conceptualized in the West during the Enlightenment", but it's a pretty big misnomer. Language matters, and the continual use of the term "Western medicine" makes it sound like non-Western places don't create & practice science-based medicine.

He mentions that in the post. Ayurveda is designed for prevention whereas modern medicine is designed for fixing. I used to be skeptic of traditional medicine but on close observation, I realize that these cultures have incorporated some or many aspects of Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine into everyday life which, at least in the past, have contributed to better mental and physical health. So, Ayurveda might not fix cancer but could potentially prevent you from getting diabetes.

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