Thread by @raghurajs_hegde

Ayurveda is not science. It is a belief system like religion. People including doctors should stop calling it science because any traditional medicine which has been shown to be effective as per modern EBM standards becomes modern medicine. Ayurveda has no scientific rationale.

Same goes for Homeopathy/Unani/Siddha/_____any traditional medicine.

Qinghaosu became the antimalarial drug Artemisinin through evidence collected by YouYou Tu. It doesn't mean Chinese medicine is scientific.

Ayurveda should aim to nurture researchers like YouYou Tu and not try to co-opt modern medicine and try to encroach into it pretending to be science.

Be YouYou Tu not Baba Ramdev.

This is a useful article to understand what scientific means. Better that the Ayurveda evangelists read this before giving gyan to me about their own definitions of science and scientific temper.

newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…

I don't need to study Ayurveda in detail to understand that this field is not based on scientific principles. The same way I don't need to know how the car exactly works to know that it is based on scientific principles.

That I even have to explain it saddens me a little bit.

Those protesting on this thread don't provide evidence but just deference to some supposed "authority" or ancient texts. Some of them are still stuck with Sushrutha Samitha in 800 BC. When they can't form a coherent meaningful sentence they descend quite fast to abuse.

I can understand where that anger comes from. It comes from the vast emptiness from 800BC to 2020AD.

Modern Medicine and Ayurveda aren't really at loggerheads excepts in the heads of the Ayurveda evangelists. It is funny how the AYUSH practitioners demonise mainstream medicine while trying their hardest to co-opt mainstream medicine incl surgical procedures of modern medicine.

Modern medicine is not dogma like AYUSH but an ever changing dynamic which keeps questioning whether there is a better way to do things. Modern medicine changes when new evidence comes to light. The medical successes that we see today is the culmination of this very dynamic.

The issue is just that there is scepticism and scientific rigor on the side of modern medicine while there is just faith and obscurantism pretending to be science in all the AYUSH streams. AYUSH will not get respect by overstating their usefulness and abusing people online.

Here's a short summary of how much modern medicine has evolved to get to where we are today. It is no mean feat.

drraghurajhegde.com/2017/02/16/med…