Hi Santosh, According to Goanet Admin, I'm not allowed to build on long posts. So do kindly refer to your last post. There is a danger of making small changes to someone�s post that may not reflect the intent of the author. I think that this is a case where we cannot possibly see eye to eye. You take the position that Ayurveda is a deception and a form of quackery that has no proven treatments. You do not accept the trial and error way in which herbals and other treatments were used in India over many centuries because it was never tested out through the modern scientific method. Without such tests you cannot accept claims of efficacy. I take the position that Ayurvedic treatments have some efficacy and do give health care in many fields. Ayurveda would have been abandoned long ago if it did not produce some cures and better health. Ayurveda was suppressed by the British, incidentally, and western medicine took ascendancy in India. However, it is coming under public scrutiny more and more today, along with Chinese and other forms of older medicine. I will look into what studies are being done as I also do believe in tests of all forms of medicine. The field that is being developed here is being called �Integrative Medicine� that uses alternative treatments as well as modern, western ones. These are a few points that I would like to clear up:
1. I do want to re-iterate that even today, plain observations precede the discovery of how a disease is spread or how it is cured. If people are dying of AIDS after they get blood transfusions, then the hypothesis that the AIDS virus is contained in blood is a common-sense observation. The tests are then carried out in the lab to confirm the observation. But which came first in this case, the full scientific study or the observation? I would say that it was the observation. You accept preliminary observations for the scientific medicine. So why wouldn�t they be accepted for Ayurveda? The doctor who discovered that washing hands prevented deaths of women after childbirth had a hard time getting it accepted by other western doctors � this is because he didn�t do a full scientific study according to your definition before he announced his conclusions. Therefore, I still hold that observations and anecdotal evidence plays an important part in medical science today just as they did in Ayurveda and other forms of ancient medicine. We obviously will always differ on this point. 2. I did not imply that making observations first is not following the scientific method. I said that Ayurveda was developed by such observations and that it pre-dates the scientific methods, so we cannot retro-actively expect it to have the proof according to your criteria. 3. I did not imply that the mere fact that a patient claims a treatment worked for him is sufficient proof that the treatment is valid. We are talking about Ayurveda, not me. The treatments developed by Ayurveda, e.g. by using herbal medicines, are based on observations of many patients over many generations, not of just one person and his or her completely subjective report of it. By comparing Ayurvedic treatments to TV evangelists and quacks out to fleece the public, you display some measure of ignorance of the Ayurvedic tradition. It is a compassionate healing service where the healing practitioner either makes little or no money even today in rural India. It is for the local populace who can�t afford the exorbitant rates of western-trained doctors and expensive pharmaceuticals. It in no way uses the hard-sell and deceptive tactics of quacks. In fact, you seem to be unaware of, or very forgiving of the hard-sell money-making tactics of the pharmaceutical companies: they either push medicines that have not been tested long enough such as HRT or deny them to the poor as in the case of AIDS treatments. 4.Statement 7: I disagree with you that Ayurveda should have found a cure for the plague because it has been around for 2000 years plus. Strange and mysterious diseases appear suddenly. No system of medicine can find cures so quickly as we have seen with AIDS and SARS despite the billions spent on developing cures. 5. �The emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria shows the limitation of the scientific method.� What I meant was that antibiotic resistant bacteria shows the limitations of the treatments produced by the scientific method, not of the scientific method itself. I said that the evidence shows that even treatments produced by use of the scientific method are flawed and not foolproof. 6. �That is why Ayurvedic and other alternative treatments may be as good as or better than modern medical treatment.� This was not my conclusion at all. What I said was that I agreed with Vivian de Souza, that we should find the best treatment with the least side effects, be it Ayurvedic or be it the result of the scientific method. I fear side-effects of modern medicines because I have had them seriously a couple of times. 7. Incidentally, I don�t think that disease in Ayurveda is seen only as a matter of imbalance in the doshas, because toxicity and immunity figure in its explanations. I am not expert in this and have to do some reading and research before I can come to a conclusion on this. Doshas, incidentally, are not just a quaint description. The herbal treatments are modified to suit a person�s doshic constitution as in the case of the insomniac I described in the last post. Filomena __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
