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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

I guess that’s my point. Perhaps there are some things useful in Ayurveda but I suspect the vast majority is pseudoscience that was a best guess for the resources available at the time.

Not suggesting this traditional medicine is a religion but that it’s similar to a lot of the dietary restrictions from history. They had some use for the time but perhaps not useful now.

I know more about Chinese traditional medicine and have similar thoughts. Some of it is interesting but lots of it is pseudoscience. Also some of it was practical advice for the time. A lot of it is always about drinking hot water. Perhaps boiled water was cleaner in previous times? But again it’s mostly pseudoscience. If you visit a traditional doctor he feels your wrist for a while and is able to create diagnoses with that along with looking at you and talking.

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And, interestingly, some of it was surprisingly effective. For example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16566952/

TCM figured out what is essentially the best modern malaria treatment centuries ago.

And boiling water was very sensible. Nowadays we treat our water differently, but before modern sanitation and water treatment, drinking unboiled water was quite dangerous. In much of Europe, people would drink beer when available instead of water, which was likely still an improvement, but alcohol is rather unhealthy. Drinking plain boiled water when thirsty was an excellent idea.

> lots of it is pseudoscience.

I can get behind the feeling of the word, but I absolutely hate this word as it has generally been used in the sense that everything modern (science, technology, people) is smarter/more advanced than anything that is old.

If something was produced as a result of a rational thought process (no ghosts, demons, Gods involved), I would be loathe to call it pseudoscience even if it didn't work most of the time. For e.g. building, clothing, weaponry that works in one climate/area may not work if you transplant it to another place on Earth. That does not mean that the techniques used are pseudoscientific in nature. They were the science of that place and time.

> If you visit a traditional doctor he feels your wrist for a while and is able to create diagnoses with that along with looking at you and talking.

A lot of traditional medicine practitioners today are probably quacks. It is possible that something of import was lost over hundreds of generations of knowledge transfer. As we have access to modern medicine that can quickly relieve symptoms, looking into what was lost might be considered to be a waste of time by some when an easier alternative is available.

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