Originally Posted by
carleton
Studies have examined Ayurvedic medicine, including herbal products, for specific conditions. However, there aren’t enough well-controlled clinical trials and systematic research reviews—the gold standard for Western medical research—to prove that the approaches are beneficial.
This is exactly my point- Western medicine can't prove that it's beneficial. But there are many, many people (billions?) who believe that it is. Because they can't prove it with your (our) techniques, does that mean that they are wrong?
I can't find my copy of
Violence, but in it Slavoj Žižek suggests that though science was used as a tool to dislodge the hegenomy of religion as the source of knowledge during the enlightenment, now, at least in the Western world, it's assumed the same position religion once had. Science does many things very well (most of the things related to track cycling, btw), but the complexities of nutrition seem to defy it... I'm gluten intolerant, which was unheard of 30 years ago, but I would offer that the emergence of celiac sprue in the last ten years is just one example that there is still much to learn about nutrition. The 180 on the role of fat is another. Again, my point is only that differing views on nutrition are valid and that attempting to prove them through an internet forum is a tall order.
Originally Posted by
brawlo
There is a great podcast here
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...port-ayurveda/ The crux of ayurveda's success is in it's lengthy development. As far as diets go, it has had literally thousands of years of trial and error development. It's evolution draws significant parallels to what we might call the scientific method in the modern age
Thanks! Your point about boiling water is well taken, but how would boiling water on someone's skin effect the traffic patterns of their city that day? Once we use inferred scientific analysis beyond the individual and into a complex, relational system it's capacity for prediction breaks down...