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Turmeric has been used in India since ancient times. There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using

Turmeric has been used in India since ancient times. There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects. Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee). So, expect more things to come out from the research of Western labs, knowledge that is common to most grandmothers in India for ages. But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do & nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects. Side fact: An American company tried to patent turmeric & almost got away with it. This had to be fought by the Indian government to prevent (or nullify) the patent application.

lgessler 9y ago
Ayurvedic medicine is far from infallible. Take this for instance, a selection from a reasonably popular Ayurvedic text (https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauhan/product-reviews/8186098372/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1 https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauh...) that is aimed at a general audience and purports to explain the health benefits of various common foods (my translation follows): > कैंसर: कैंसर में पहले तीन दिन रोगी को उपवास कराएं, फिर अंगूर सेवन कराना आरम्भ करें। कभी-कभी एनिमा लगाएं। एक दिन में दो किलो से अधिक अंगूर न खिलाएं। कुछ दिन पश्चात छाछ पीने को दी जा सकती है। अन्य कोई चीज़ खाने को न दें। इससे लाभ धीरे-धीरे महीनों में होता है। इसकी पुल्टिस घावों पर लगा सकते हैं। इस रोग की चिकित्सा में कभी-कभी अंगूर का रस लेने से पेट-दर्द मलद्वार पर जलन होती है। इससे डरना नहीं चाहिए। दर्द कुछ दिनों में ठीक हो जाता है। दर्द होने पर सेक कर सकते हैं। > Cancer: for cancer, have the patient fast for three days, then begin their intake of grapes. Perform enemas intermittently. Don't feed the patient more than two kilos of grapes in a day. After a few days, buttermilk may be given for drinking. Do not provide anything else to drink. In the next few months, an improvement will slowly be noted. A poultice may be applied to their wounds. In the course of the treatment of this disease, the intake of grape juice will occasionally cause stomachaches and a burning sensation on the anus. This is no cause for concern. The pain will subside in a few days. Compressions may be given to alleviate the pain. You could argue that such obvious quackery has also been peddled by Western doctors who are trained in the scientific method. That is true, but at least these doctors' manuscripts wouldn't be accepted by any reputable journal. Admittedly I'm not sure how the Ayurvedic medical community organizes itself in India, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't place so much emphasis on the scientific method, and you also imply this in your comment. A less extreme example of what's found in the book, a remedy for diabetes using bitter gourd juice: > मधुमेह: रोगी को १५ ग्राम करेले का रस सौ ग्राम पानी में मिलाकर नित्य तीन बार करीब तीन महीने पिलाना चाहिए। खाने में भी करेले की सब्ज़ी लें। > Diabetes: Have the patient drink 15 grams of bitter gourd juice in 100 grams of water 3 times daily continuously for three months. They should also eat cooked bitter gourd. I think you'd agree that the remedy above isn't as good a treatment for diabetes as an insulin regimen--the one prescribed, by the way, by Western medicine. In summary, there's no doubt that traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine have discovered legitimate remedies, but it seems like they generally prescribe a large number of false positive treatments. And if you also believe that the scientific method is the best epistemological apparatus that humans have found so far, then you should be skeptical of these remedies until they have been clinically demonstrated to be effective.
- dahidahi1 9y ago
  I did not claim it to be infallible, nobody does. It is a science, on equal footing with any other science. It followed the same rigorous trial & error procedures that is required of all sciences. And science does gets things wrong. Ayurveda roughly translates to the knowledge / science of health. Just because it is from India & it follows Hindu traditions does not disqualify it from anything.
  - szemet 9y ago
    Ayurvedic theory (5 elements etc...) is usless compared to modern science, so much that I dare to say it is wrong... Does it have predictive (and thus real explanatory) power? Imagine a test (other similar tests can be imagined): give some powder to a western chemist/biologist and an ayurvedic to examine its "elements". You are not allowed to feed it to any human or animal. Decide if it is poisonous! Who will be more successful? Ayurveda knows nothing about modern chemisrty or biology (real elements, cells,...), its theory part is rubish (from the perspective of natural science not from social science perspective (history, philosophy...) of course). You may trust its experimental results, but that is not science in itself just a tradition...
  - Elrac 9y ago
    I'm going to chime in to the growing chorus of HNers trying to explain to you why you're wrong. There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
    - dahidahi1 9y ago
      Agreed that there is no "any other science". But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify. The reasons for this prejudice are too many, but it has a religious angle, an angle that the Church has pushed for too long that people have forgotten any other angle. Also the angle of Islamic destruction, which has ensured that most texts & documentation are destroyed under the pretext of war & iconoclasm. Please see my other comments.
ng12 9y ago
The problem is it's hard to make money off of those things. There's strong evidence suggesting papaya seeds are remarkably good for purging parasites from the digestive system -- but why research it further when you can push Albendazole for $400/treatment?
- utkarshsinha 9y ago
  You can sell papaya seeds for $200/treatment.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    Only until people find out they're papaya seeds and just go buy a papaya for $3.
    - dboreham 9y ago
      That papaya might not be safe though.
      - danielvinson 9y ago
        Why wouldn't a papaya be safe? Everything I've seen says that the seeds are always edible.
        nf05papsjfVbc 9y ago
        In fact they have been used to adulterate stocks of black pepper since a long time.
        dboreham 9y ago
        Ironic comment : Drug companies tell us we can't buy their products through other countries (at much lower cost) because "safety".
      - dahidahi1 9y ago
        Just like that?? Papaya seeds are good, but the papaya itself is not safe? — this does not make sense anyway you look at it.
taco_emoji 9y ago
But how do you actually know if these Ayurvedic practices work without the rigorous trial and error that "Western" science demands? Unless I'm mistaken, the Ayurvedic texts do not contain repeatable evidence of the efficacy of the treatments described within them, nor do they describe plausible explanations of how those treatments work. Whatever truths are contained in Ayurvedic texts are accidental unless they were arrived at by some sort of experimentation, and they're mixed in with a lot of nonsense which "Western" science is attempting to sift through. Along with proving the potency of some Ayurvedic treatments, science is also DISproving that of many others, which means that it's not "catching up" with Ayurvedic so much as catching it, shining a bright light on it, and asking it much tougher questions than anybody thought to ask before.
- danans 9y ago
  The OP comment strikes me as having a rather jingoistic/nationalistic tone, so I sort of doubt its sincerity regarding question of efficacy of Ayurvedic practices. Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
  - dahidahi1 9y ago
    > Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial. How is that different from science? That is great & is science. Maybe you do not recall the recent news about how Radium painting was also science. All this is science, especially the Ayurvedic sciences. What else is it?
    - danans 9y ago
      It is different in important ways from the modern scientific method [1]. In particular, it omits (or has long since stopped): - Developing testable (falsifiable) predictions - Gathering data to test the predictions - Refining, Altering, Expanding, or Rejecting Hypotheses Modern science is actively doing all those things: constantly re-evaluating its own prior conclusions and testing against the most recent empirical data available. Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:The_Scientific_Method_as_an_Ongoing_Process.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...
ksk 9y ago
>There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects. Homeopathy also has zero side effects (apart from having zero effects). There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. The vast majority is pseudo-scientific nonsense that should be rejected. >Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee). All of those are known to the entire world, both their exaggerated benefits and their limitations. Sorry to burst your bubble. >But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do & You are severely confused. Do you take coconut oil when you get cancer? Or do you take Turmeric? If you get liver disease do you use copper vessels? Nobody cares where the idea originated. When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results. > nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects. That doesn't explain the success of pseudo-scientific products marketed under the "Patanjali" brand. Also, there is no such thing as "Western science". Its a global science and people from around the world are contributing to it. Go into any research lab in the "west". You'll find a large portion of people there belonging to chinese and south asian heritage apart from the local ethnic majority.
- carlmr 9y ago
  Thank you for your bulls* antidote. I especially liked the part about western science vs global science.
- palimpsests 9y ago
  > There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. Seriously? We can do better than that - if you're going to make a statement that extreme, you'll need to provide sources to back it up.
  - ksk 9y ago

lgessler 9y ago

Ayurvedic medicine is far from infallible. Take this for instance, a selection from a reasonably popular Ayurvedic text (https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauhan/product-reviews/8186098372/ref=dpx_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1 https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauh...) that is aimed at a general audience and purports to explain the health benefits of various common foods (my translation follows): > कैंसर: कैंसर में पहले तीन दिन रोगी को उपवास कराएं, फिर अंगूर सेवन कराना आरम्भ करें। कभी-कभी एनिमा लगाएं। एक दिन में दो किलो से अधिक अंगूर न खिलाएं। कुछ दिन पश्चात छाछ पीने को दी जा सकती है। अन्य कोई चीज़ खाने को न दें। इससे लाभ धीरे-धीरे महीनों में होता है। इसकी पुल्टिस घावों पर लगा सकते हैं। इस रोग की चिकित्सा में कभी-कभी अंगूर का रस लेने से पेट-दर्द मलद्वार पर जलन होती है। इससे डरना नहीं चाहिए। दर्द कुछ दिनों में ठीक हो जाता है। दर्द होने पर सेक कर सकते हैं। > Cancer: for cancer, have the patient fast for three days, then begin their intake of grapes. Perform enemas intermittently. Don't feed the patient more than two kilos of grapes in a day. After a few days, buttermilk may be given for drinking. Do not provide anything else to drink. In the next few months, an improvement will slowly be noted. A poultice may be applied to their wounds. In the course of the treatment of this disease, the intake of grape juice will occasionally cause stomachaches and a burning sensation on the anus. This is no cause for concern. The pain will subside in a few days. Compressions may be given to alleviate the pain. You could argue that such obvious quackery has also been peddled by Western doctors who are trained in the scientific method. That is true, but at least these doctors' manuscripts wouldn't be accepted by any reputable journal. Admittedly I'm not sure how the Ayurvedic medical community organizes itself in India, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't place so much emphasis on the scientific method, and you also imply this in your comment. A less extreme example of what's found in the book, a remedy for diabetes using bitter gourd juice: > मधुमेह: रोगी को १५ ग्राम करेले का रस सौ ग्राम पानी में मिलाकर नित्य तीन बार करीब तीन महीने पिलाना चाहिए। खाने में भी करेले की सब्ज़ी लें। > Diabetes: Have the patient drink 15 grams of bitter gourd juice in 100 grams of water 3 times daily continuously for three months. They should also eat cooked bitter gourd. I think you'd agree that the remedy above isn't as good a treatment for diabetes as an insulin regimen--the one prescribed, by the way, by Western medicine. In summary, there's no doubt that traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine have discovered legitimate remedies, but it seems like they generally prescribe a large number of false positive treatments. And if you also believe that the scientific method is the best epistemological apparatus that humans have found so far, then you should be skeptical of these remedies until they have been clinically demonstrated to be effective.

dahidahi1 9y ago
I did not claim it to be infallible, nobody does. It is a science, on equal footing with any other science. It followed the same rigorous trial & error procedures that is required of all sciences. And science does gets things wrong. Ayurveda roughly translates to the knowledge / science of health. Just because it is from India & it follows Hindu traditions does not disqualify it from anything.
- szemet 9y ago
  Ayurvedic theory (5 elements etc...) is usless compared to modern science, so much that I dare to say it is wrong... Does it have predictive (and thus real explanatory) power? Imagine a test (other similar tests can be imagined): give some powder to a western chemist/biologist and an ayurvedic to examine its "elements". You are not allowed to feed it to any human or animal. Decide if it is poisonous! Who will be more successful? Ayurveda knows nothing about modern chemisrty or biology (real elements, cells,...), its theory part is rubish (from the perspective of natural science not from social science perspective (history, philosophy...) of course). You may trust its experimental results, but that is not science in itself just a tradition...
- Elrac 9y ago
  I'm going to chime in to the growing chorus of HNers trying to explain to you why you're wrong. There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
  - dahidahi1 9y ago
    Agreed that there is no "any other science". But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify. The reasons for this prejudice are too many, but it has a religious angle, an angle that the Church has pushed for too long that people have forgotten any other angle. Also the angle of Islamic destruction, which has ensured that most texts & documentation are destroyed under the pretext of war & iconoclasm. Please see my other comments.

ng12 9y ago

The problem is it's hard to make money off of those things. There's strong evidence suggesting papaya seeds are remarkably good for purging parasites from the digestive system -- but why research it further when you can push Albendazole for $400/treatment?

utkarshsinha 9y ago
You can sell papaya seeds for $200/treatment.
- dasil003 9y ago
  Only until people find out they're papaya seeds and just go buy a papaya for $3.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    That papaya might not be safe though.
    - danielvinson 9y ago
      Why wouldn't a papaya be safe? Everything I've seen says that the seeds are always edible.
      - nf05papsjfVbc 9y ago
        In fact they have been used to adulterate stocks of black pepper since a long time.
      - dboreham 9y ago
        Ironic comment : Drug companies tell us we can't buy their products through other countries (at much lower cost) because "safety".
    - dahidahi1 9y ago
      Just like that?? Papaya seeds are good, but the papaya itself is not safe? — this does not make sense anyway you look at it.

taco_emoji 9y ago

But how do you actually know if these Ayurvedic practices work without the rigorous trial and error that "Western" science demands? Unless I'm mistaken, the Ayurvedic texts do not contain repeatable evidence of the efficacy of the treatments described within them, nor do they describe plausible explanations of how those treatments work. Whatever truths are contained in Ayurvedic texts are accidental unless they were arrived at by some sort of experimentation, and they're mixed in with a lot of nonsense which "Western" science is attempting to sift through. Along with proving the potency of some Ayurvedic treatments, science is also DISproving that of many others, which means that it's not "catching up" with Ayurvedic so much as catching it, shining a bright light on it, and asking it much tougher questions than anybody thought to ask before.

danans 9y ago
The OP comment strikes me as having a rather jingoistic/nationalistic tone, so I sort of doubt its sincerity regarding question of efficacy of Ayurvedic practices. Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
- dahidahi1 9y ago
  > Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial. How is that different from science? That is great & is science. Maybe you do not recall the recent news about how Radium painting was also science. All this is science, especially the Ayurvedic sciences. What else is it?
  - danans 9y ago
    It is different in important ways from the modern scientific method [1]. In particular, it omits (or has long since stopped): - Developing testable (falsifiable) predictions - Gathering data to test the predictions - Refining, Altering, Expanding, or Rejecting Hypotheses Modern science is actively doing all those things: constantly re-evaluating its own prior conclusions and testing against the most recent empirical data available. Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:The_Scientific_Method_as_an_Ongoing_Process.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...

ksk 9y ago

>There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects. Homeopathy also has zero side effects (apart from having zero effects). There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. The vast majority is pseudo-scientific nonsense that should be rejected. >Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee). All of those are known to the entire world, both their exaggerated benefits and their limitations. Sorry to burst your bubble. >But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do & You are severely confused. Do you take coconut oil when you get cancer? Or do you take Turmeric? If you get liver disease do you use copper vessels? Nobody cares where the idea originated. When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results. > nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects. That doesn't explain the success of pseudo-scientific products marketed under the "Patanjali" brand. Also, there is no such thing as "Western science". Its a global science and people from around the world are contributing to it. Go into any research lab in the "west". You'll find a large portion of people there belonging to chinese and south asian heritage apart from the local ethnic majority.

carlmr 9y ago
Thank you for your bulls* antidote. I especially liked the part about western science vs global science.
palimpsests 9y ago
> There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. Seriously? We can do better than that - if you're going to make a statement that extreme, you'll need to provide sources to back it up.
- ksk 9y ago