10 ms·

the FDA method of approving poisons like modern medicines may not be a relevant methodology for herbs. Before you get all upset I called your favorite prescrip

• Nursie 14y ago
  Everything in 'high doses' is a poison, even pure, distilled water. Herbs either contain active chemicals or they're a placebo. If they're a placebo they're as good as taking a sugar pill. If they contain active chemicals they contain unstandardised amounts and probably in concert with all sorts of other things that may or may not be helpful or harmful. Ayurveda is bullshit. QED.
  • up_and_up 14y ago
    > Ayurveda is bullshit My wife is an Ayurvedic practitioner, so yes I am biased, but I dont believe in every aspect of it. I can definitely say it is not "bullshit" and it is indeed helping many of her clients. She has people who come to her, that conventional docs have literally given up on. "We cant figure out what is wrong with your digestion, theres nothing more we can try" she hears stories like that all the time. People ARE being helped. Whether it is all placebo I dont know for sure. but people who literally have no other options in conventional medicine are seeing real results. They are sleeping better w/o medication, they are not having anxiety attacks anymore, I could go on and on with her stories. My wife is pretty humble about it and not selling snake oil etc. People are seeing real results.
    • Nursie 14y ago
      If there is an effect that's measurable above placebo we should absolutely find out what it is and why it works. Otherwise it's just like the rest of these things. My statement, however, was not about whether your wife can make people feel better in ill-defined ways, it was about the ludicrous claims above on herbs and 'poison'.
    • amalag 14y ago
      It doesn't follow the western model of logic, which is why uninformed people who cannot understand subtleties insist on displaying their boarishness. For instance ayurveda says the stomach has digestive fire, it does not give you a list of chemicals which break down food. Rather it seeks to strengthen that digestive fire. If you want to peek in there with a catheter and say "Nope, there is no fire, ayurveda is bullshit" Well then, best of luck with your clinical trials trying to experiment on the newest medicines. There is value in that. It is not based on an inductive experimental approach so it does not fit with most western scientists. The idea is it is like an instruction manual, not reverse engineering. The human body was not evolved from some random processes for us to reverse engineer, rather there is an inherent design and ayurveda explains it. People may not agree with those depths of it, but that is the origin and philosophy.
      • Nursie 14y ago
        "The human body was not evolved from some random processes for us to reverse engineer, rather there is an inherent design and ayurveda explains it." Hooray, you've admitted you're peddling religion, and creationism at that. Well done.
      • dalke 14y ago
        You ascribe an overly reductionist viewpoint on scientific thought. The scientific analysis would be to note that 'digestive fire' might not literally be a fire (just like 'I've got the runs' doesn't mean that I want to run). The corresponding experiment would be "if person X is treated with Y1 then does outcome Z occur with any statistical difference compared to treatment with Y2", where "Y2" can be "doing nothing." This has nothing to do with peering inside the body, only with outcomes. Once a difference has been identified, then it's reasonable to try to identify how 'digestive fire' might map to aspects of the body. There are well more than trillions of possible treatments, so as a strategy a scientist will use a model of how the body works in order to prioritize the investigation. For example, the presence of a single butterfly between 50 and 100 meters away certainly does not affect most people's digestion, and can be put very low on the list of parameters to explore. The only part of the "western model of logic" which applies is determining if the treatment had an beneficial effect. If you say that that doesn't apply, then you also throw out the possibility of determining if a treatment isn't actually effective.
    • Cthulhu_ 14y ago
      > They are sleeping better w/o medication, they are not having anxiety attacks anymore, I could go on and on with her stories. I would definitely attribute sleeping and anxiety problems as mental issues; medication will try to mess with the body's (brain)chemistry to fix it, but, whilst not into alternative medicine, I do think non-chemical treatments - psychology, relaxation therapy, physical therapy - can help with that category of ailments.
    • Nursie 14y ago
      I would add to my other response that your wife is probably a very caring and patient person, and by listening to people with trouble, taking time to understand them, and doing whatever it is she does with ayurveda, I have no doubt at all that she helps people. I wouldn't even rule out that ayurveda itself is helping them as well as just spending time being listened to and relaxing as a result. I don't know much about it and if there are dietary, meditative and exercise aspects then it's probably doing her patients a power of good! I just think the other poster's talk about poisons is rubbish :) My 'bullshit' comment was a sort of a logical construction. If some of the 'facts' upon which Ayurveda is predicated can be shown to be wrong, Ayurveda as a thought system is wrong (it produces incorrect results). Doesn't mean everything about it is wrong, just that it doesn't always make good predictions/proclamations. A bit like... I don't believe in Jesus but the whole 'do unto others' line is awesome :)
  • amalag 14y ago
    Water is a poison therefore a system of health you don't understand is bullshit, great logic. I am not going to bother arguing since you want to lump everything together in your clinical trials. "Well gee, if healthy food is good for you, let's extract the chemical from it, inject it into our body and test it, if it is really healthy we will see good effects, otherwise it must be a placebo"
    • Nursie 14y ago
      You said that modern medicine is poison if taken in high doses. I pointed out that anything is a poison in high doses. You said that Ayurveda prefers herbs over 'poison' and lumped all modern medicine in with 'poison'. So I pointed out that this is nonsense too. If 'Ayurveda' makes these claims, then I'm sorry but it's full of bullshit. I'm sorry if this offends you, but it really is that simple. Maybe there are other parts of what it teaches that are less fallacious, but what you've said here so far is demonstrably false.
      • amalag 14y ago
        >Anything is a poison in high doses. I can see that is the limit of your intellectual presentation, good job. Nice to see your nuanced understanding of the health benefits of tylenol vs a bowl of hot cooked rice. I will remember that the next time I am munching on a bowl of tylenol.
        • Nursie 14y ago
          WTF?? Seriously, just because "Anything is poison in high doses", it doesn't follow that a "high dose" is the same for everything. Christ almighty you're dumb.
    • illuminate 14y ago
      "is a poison therefore a system of health you don't understand" I find it amusing that persons who abuse the word "toxins" project their own confusion on others.
• dalke 14y ago
  "Ayurveda states there are 3 ways to cure disease. Food, herbs and poisons." That, of course, is wrong. There are additional way to cure a disease. Unless of course that you're using "poison" as a catch-all term to mean anything which isn't food or herbs, in which case it it's a rather useless redefinition to mean simply 'neither food nor herb.' For example, radiation therapy for cancer is neither a food nor herb, so by definition you place it into "poison", even though it doesn't act like any chemical poison. There's a certain logic to that assignment - radiation treatment is not something an otherwise healthy person would do - but it's a treatment that no traditional Ayurveda practitioner ever considered. UVB exposure (ie, sunlight or phototherapy) can be an effective treatment for some people who are vitamin B deficient because of malabsorption syndromes (like Cystic fibrosis and short bowel syndrome) which prevent them from absorbing vitamin D through their diet. Since UVB can cure a disease but is neither a food nor an herb, it must be a poison, right? But UVB is something that healthy people get all the time, so it wouldn't normally be considered a poison. In fact, it could be removed completely, so long as there were other source of vitamin B. Still, you might say that UVB is a food instead of a poison. The problem there is that too much exposure to UVB increases the risk of cancer. Is it both a food and a poison? Oxygen therapy is useful as part of many treatments, including aborting cluster headache attacks. Perhaps oxygen is also a food? Bu too much oxygen leads to oxygen toxicity. So it is definitely a poison, right? Interesting that we require poison in order to breath. The issue is, as Nursie stressed, that "the dose makes the poison". Paracelsus said that almost 500 years ago, and it's still true. Even in Ayurvedic assignments of different treatments. Ayurveda says that nutmeg is an herb, right? It's used as a medicine because of its sedative properties. But eat 10 or so of the seeds and there's a good chance you will die. So, an herb can also be a poison? Obviously then the three categories are not that distinct. I would argue that they are blurry enough as to be unusable. Life is not so simple as to classify treatments into three distinct groups. And I don't know what you mean by "Modern [medicine] ... has very little information on how to cure through food." Beriberi, rickets, scurvy, pellagra, kwashiorkor, Korsakoff's syndrome, and Wernicke's encephalopathy are just some of the diseases which modern medicine has cured through food. For several thousand years, beriberi was endemic in Asia, because polished white rice was a staple food. What is the Ayurveda treatment for handle that disease, and was it developed before or after modern medical researchers identified that it was nutrition deficiency? (Hint: it was after.) (PS: ultrasonic waves are used to break up kidney stones. That's cure for a disease, no? Are ultrasonic waves food, herb, or poison?)