ShootMyMonkey
New Member
For quite some time, I haven't really been in such a position as to worry about Ayurvedic bunkum within my own circle of contacts. Sure, I have a lot of elders in my family who believe in it, but many of them still put more stock in actual medicine, and if the two paths created conflicting outcomes, more often than not, they would trust real doctors first. I had to deal with it very little growing up because as traditional as many people were who surrounded me, I was also directly surrounded by math, engineering, and science books... along with a good amount of material on music as well, though that's a bit unrelated to the topic. Although we didn't have much to count as for medical material, or even very much of anything about biology in particular, there was still enough of a scientific mentality to account for some element of reason even among those who were otherwise die-hard nuts for alternative treatments. Now, I might have been a little bit sheltered from that having parents who stood quite a distance from the lunacy, but that enabled me as a child to study Ayurveda from a third-person perspective.
What I found, more or less, was that it was complete and utter garbage of the highest order. There was nothing in there based on any sort of real substantial basis. Almost all of it is based on tradition and word-of-mouth, and it's organized into this bizarre vitalistic view of health, in much the same way as homeopathy is (though I wouldn't even know the term homeopathy until much later in life). Now it is true that because of my outright absolute disdain for tradition as a vehicle for creating merit, I did take the extreme position that there could be nothing of value in Ayurveda. But then, I was 7 years old at the time I arrived at that conclusion, so it isn't entirely unexpected that I would do something that off-the-mark. I've since at least accepted that Ayurveda has probably amassed enough ideas about remedies that some of them are valid, and at least a few have actually gone through solid testing by real doctors in recent years. Nonetheless, the foundational principles of Ayurvedic medicine are still garbage, and the notions it has about how or why anything works are demonstrably wrong.
A large part of the market for Ayurveda here in the U.S. is not really the practice of what pretends to be medicine, but generally more therapeutic services like massages and spa treatments. While this is still steeped heavily in a large sea of nonsensical babble in the same way that almost all so-called spa "treatments" and concepts are, at least nobody views these practices as vital facets of our continued well-being in the same way that something labeled "medicine" would be. Massages and oil rubs and so on are viewed as luxury services and we tend to treat them as such. So we splurge a little bit on snake oil rubbed into our backs... it's discretionary spending of disposable income, at least. Interest among Westerners in anything with the label Ayurvedic, whether massages or claimant medical treatments, has less to do with any particular merits, but simply the intrigue and allure of something exotic.
The biggest advocates of promoting Ayurveda as a serious form of medicine here in the U.S. all tend to buy into the school of Ayurveda founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1980s. The lord of woo, Deepak Chopra, is one of those wooed by his message. This is where the weirdest things start to come up and it's the kind of mumbo-jumbo that permeates this field. Mahesh Yogi's concept is pretty close to what a large fraction of the "certified ayurvedic institutes" teach in that there are some apparently irreducible influences called "doshas." The concept of a dosha is actually not an exclusively "medical" thing within Hindu culture, just to be clear. It actually has some significance in Vedic astrology and used to be common terminology in music theory (though the latter fell out of fashion in the early 16th century CE, AFAICT). You can think of it like a generic term for an "effect" or "aspect", really. Within astrology, a dosha may refer to some sort of planetary influence (e.g. mangal dosha). Within music, a dosha might refer to a relative dissonance (e.g. vivaadhi dosha). And in Ayurveda, it refers to some particular subset of your body's functions and/or how they may be affected. Although not everybody seems to simplify down to just the 3 dosha that Deepak Chopra and his ilk speak of, the basic principle is still pretty universal. The fundamental thesis of Ayurveda is that vital forces and aspects can be affected by various means and the goal is simply to balance all such aspects.
On the surface, the idea of aiming for balance in all aspects of your health seems like sound advice. Problem is that what constitutes an aspect of your health is not really well-defined. Even if I were to use such a generic term as "effect" or "aspect" to a real doctor, you'd get a pretty fuzzy response. After all, what really constitutes an "aspect" can be arbitrarily broad or specific as there is no such medical terminology. The Chopra woo defines "Vata", "Pitta", and "Kapha" doshas, and they're actually quite astonishingly broad. Vata dosha, for example, is said to govern "all functions of bodily movement" and apparently accumulates during cold weather, and is somehow connected to excitement, adaptability to change, mental alertness, blood pressure, arthritis, and restlessness. Just on that alone, we see a clear contradiction between the broad swath cut by this dosha and the notion that the dosha are all "irreducible." Anybody who has even a rudimentary basis of knowledge of medicine would be able to tell you that all these aspects are not mutually correlated. What exactly is "irreducible" about the dosha then? Why exactly is it possible for the dosha balance to change even within the span of a single hour? Why is it that someone who is apparently diagnosed as having more than one dosha "out of balance" is directed to "balance" them individually on seasonal boundaries? In all my efforts to get any clarity out an Ayurvedic practitioner, I have yet to get even a single incidence of clarity. In fact, the most common response I get is simply "just try it and see." For Ayurveds practicing here in the U.S., the response is almost always much worse -- usually, something along the lines of "To those who believe, all things are possible." Call me crazy, but I kind of like a certain aspect of science in that things are true whether you believe it or not.
There are those who argue that this school of thought is quackery, and contend that "real" Ayurveda is very different from the nonsense that Deepak Chopra feeds the public. What is interesting is that there actually is a pretty wide variety in the principles and what people prescribe. Some argue that all medicines should be in liquid form, some argue that all should be in whole food form, some argue that it doesn't matter. Some believe that adding heavy metals like gold and mercury (I wish I was kidding) to the tinctures will improve efficacy, others argue that wax/camphor will be more potent. Some will think the substances they sell alone will do the trick, others will lead you down dietary advice, and others still will prescribe yoga exercises to add onto the treatment. Worst of all is that they rarely agree on what should be offered for any particular condition. Now it's one thing for two different doctors to offer two different prescriptions or even differing diagnoses... it's another thing entirely for two different doctors to base their practice on entirely different principles and standards. Diagnostics is by nature ambiguous because a lot of our body's systems and chemistry is multifunctional. Any one substance, any one hormone, any one chemical serves more than one purpose in our bodies. This means in turn that it is entirely impossible to associate a given symptom with a single cause. Even a very complex mix of several symptoms can be linked to countless other causes. Narrowing down your diagnosis to something specific typically involves gathering more information than the obviously apparent symptoms. While two doctors may come to different conclusions, the idea of how they get there is basically the same. Ayurveda doesn't even have this sort of unified standard, so how on Earth is it trustworthy? Or more accurately, if there are indeed non-quacks among Ayurveds, how would you be able to tell? A real doctor at least has to be licensed to practice, and to work at a reputable hospital, certain standards must be maintained if a doctor is to continue to be able to provide care. Even an otherwise excellent doctor can have that license revoked for a single violation of basic rules and regulations... it seems harsh, but that is an institution in place to ensure that patients get care that meets a minimum bar of quality. Alternative practices have no such regulation. There is simply no concept of Ayurvedic malpractice, and they argue that it isn't even possible in the first place. I have heard countless times the argument that Ayurveda never has any side effects. Patients as well as practitioners say this to me all the time. This of course, is in every way impossible. Even if I were to ignore the people who practice the rasa shastra principle of adding heavy metals to their preparations (treating them as an anomaly), the multi-purpose nature of our body chemistry also means that if you have an effect on any one thing, it's going to also affect the other functions of that thing. There simply can never be a way around this. While this doesn't really cross the mind of a lot of people, people who should know better still spew this sort of tripe because they blindly accept anything Ayurvedic. I have people close to me who categorically reject all science-based medicine due to the influence of Ayurved family members.. some of whom actually make this claim of no side effects as if it is irrefutable fact in spite of the fact that they have knowledge and understanding of biochemistry which puts my own to shame (I am merely an engineer with an interest in math and science, not an actual scientist). Many of them most certainly know better than that, but the attachment to belief and tradition is stronger than fact. The simple truth is that Ayurveda is without a single shred of rigor in its principles, in its survey of facts, or in its testing. It's not that there are no side effects -- it's that there is no effort whatsoever in Ayurveda to even determine what side effects there would be. So as far as they are concerned, they just don't exist. Actual medicine reports side effects for every drug because they've actually gone through the trouble to verify their occurrence.
Now I happen to have in-laws who are Ayurvedic practitioners, and I am frank in my disapproval. Many would go as far as to blindly reject anything that science-based medicine proposes and only go with the Ayurvedic remedy. Within India, this has a tinge of nationalism to it because so much of scientific medical advancements came at the hands of post-industrial Western civilization, and the idea that this is the work of evil foreign minds creeps in rather than the idea that something should be evaluated based on its actual merits. To be fair, though, the practice of medicine is far more lax within India, so it is also difficult to pin down who to trust. Within the U.S., it happens because people are so terrified by the medical "establishment" that they distrust it implicitly and favor that which is so apparently different. Also, having a mechanism of being an "ancient" tradition as its mode of fake merit makes it easy for someone to hide lies about the process. Because Ayurveda is basically derived from centuries or even millennia-old notions collected about health and medicine and passed down either orally or through sparse and/or religious texts, it is easy to say that it holds a lot of things that it really doesn't. Either you can argue that we haven't fully come to understand the ancient writings in their full profundity (I feel the need to vomit when I hear this)... or you can claim that it had an outright cure for something science hasn't cured, but the corresponding texts have been mysteriously lost (which is basically just a bold-face lie wearing the "unfalsifiable" guise). It never really registers that this is basically no better than not having the knowledge at all, but it gives someone more comfort to believe that the answers are already there and we have to find it than to know that actual scientists are actually doing serious study on the subject to determine the answers. Well, that's what pseudoscience is good at -- claiming to have a "deeper" truth, but never actually demonstrating it.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they recoil in disgust away from Big Pharma and leap into the arms of Big Placebo is this idea that because the philosophies are fundamentally different, the nature of treatment is not only fundamentally different, but entirely mutually exclusive. Hence, why you might hear the sorts of insane claims about how they can cure things where "Western" medical doctors gave up. Stories of this nature are invariably outright lies. In fact, where Ayurvedic remedies have some demonstrable value, it is also demonstrable that it happens to agree with actual science-based medicine. This may include things like home remedies that involve something of known efficacy to modern science all the way up to procedures like rhinoplasty. The key difference is that Ayurveda has no explanation for why or how anything works which is even remotely grounded in fact. Actual medical science can tell you that home remedy A works because of X, Y, and Z, and if you're really curious enough to find out, you can find answers right down to the molecular level of detail. Pseudoscientific quackery like Ayurveda can at best offer nebulous images of energy states and often times, astrological influences and nonsense about chakras and doshas and built-up stress. There is simply not one whit of hope to get any real answer which actually has some facts. Most Ayurvedic remedies which do work are of the nature of things which people tried at home centuries ago and figured it worked for them, and that's usually the best answer that can be offered -- anecdotal evidence. Now while anecdotal evidence is, by nature, the weakest of all forms of evidence, the fact is that it does mean that compared to far more bizarre alt-med nonsense like homeopathy, Ayurveda probably has a slightly better record of efficacy. That is to be expected since it has a longer history behind it, and along the centuries, someone is bound to stumble upon something which is correct.
So then, who do you trust? Someone who makes mistakes, learns, and corrects their thinking along the way and rigorously tests their ideas, or someone who is right by accident?
What I found, more or less, was that it was complete and utter garbage of the highest order. There was nothing in there based on any sort of real substantial basis. Almost all of it is based on tradition and word-of-mouth, and it's organized into this bizarre vitalistic view of health, in much the same way as homeopathy is (though I wouldn't even know the term homeopathy until much later in life). Now it is true that because of my outright absolute disdain for tradition as a vehicle for creating merit, I did take the extreme position that there could be nothing of value in Ayurveda. But then, I was 7 years old at the time I arrived at that conclusion, so it isn't entirely unexpected that I would do something that off-the-mark. I've since at least accepted that Ayurveda has probably amassed enough ideas about remedies that some of them are valid, and at least a few have actually gone through solid testing by real doctors in recent years. Nonetheless, the foundational principles of Ayurvedic medicine are still garbage, and the notions it has about how or why anything works are demonstrably wrong.
A large part of the market for Ayurveda here in the U.S. is not really the practice of what pretends to be medicine, but generally more therapeutic services like massages and spa treatments. While this is still steeped heavily in a large sea of nonsensical babble in the same way that almost all so-called spa "treatments" and concepts are, at least nobody views these practices as vital facets of our continued well-being in the same way that something labeled "medicine" would be. Massages and oil rubs and so on are viewed as luxury services and we tend to treat them as such. So we splurge a little bit on snake oil rubbed into our backs... it's discretionary spending of disposable income, at least. Interest among Westerners in anything with the label Ayurvedic, whether massages or claimant medical treatments, has less to do with any particular merits, but simply the intrigue and allure of something exotic.
The biggest advocates of promoting Ayurveda as a serious form of medicine here in the U.S. all tend to buy into the school of Ayurveda founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1980s. The lord of woo, Deepak Chopra, is one of those wooed by his message. This is where the weirdest things start to come up and it's the kind of mumbo-jumbo that permeates this field. Mahesh Yogi's concept is pretty close to what a large fraction of the "certified ayurvedic institutes" teach in that there are some apparently irreducible influences called "doshas." The concept of a dosha is actually not an exclusively "medical" thing within Hindu culture, just to be clear. It actually has some significance in Vedic astrology and used to be common terminology in music theory (though the latter fell out of fashion in the early 16th century CE, AFAICT). You can think of it like a generic term for an "effect" or "aspect", really. Within astrology, a dosha may refer to some sort of planetary influence (e.g. mangal dosha). Within music, a dosha might refer to a relative dissonance (e.g. vivaadhi dosha). And in Ayurveda, it refers to some particular subset of your body's functions and/or how they may be affected. Although not everybody seems to simplify down to just the 3 dosha that Deepak Chopra and his ilk speak of, the basic principle is still pretty universal. The fundamental thesis of Ayurveda is that vital forces and aspects can be affected by various means and the goal is simply to balance all such aspects.
On the surface, the idea of aiming for balance in all aspects of your health seems like sound advice. Problem is that what constitutes an aspect of your health is not really well-defined. Even if I were to use such a generic term as "effect" or "aspect" to a real doctor, you'd get a pretty fuzzy response. After all, what really constitutes an "aspect" can be arbitrarily broad or specific as there is no such medical terminology. The Chopra woo defines "Vata", "Pitta", and "Kapha" doshas, and they're actually quite astonishingly broad. Vata dosha, for example, is said to govern "all functions of bodily movement" and apparently accumulates during cold weather, and is somehow connected to excitement, adaptability to change, mental alertness, blood pressure, arthritis, and restlessness. Just on that alone, we see a clear contradiction between the broad swath cut by this dosha and the notion that the dosha are all "irreducible." Anybody who has even a rudimentary basis of knowledge of medicine would be able to tell you that all these aspects are not mutually correlated. What exactly is "irreducible" about the dosha then? Why exactly is it possible for the dosha balance to change even within the span of a single hour? Why is it that someone who is apparently diagnosed as having more than one dosha "out of balance" is directed to "balance" them individually on seasonal boundaries? In all my efforts to get any clarity out an Ayurvedic practitioner, I have yet to get even a single incidence of clarity. In fact, the most common response I get is simply "just try it and see." For Ayurveds practicing here in the U.S., the response is almost always much worse -- usually, something along the lines of "To those who believe, all things are possible." Call me crazy, but I kind of like a certain aspect of science in that things are true whether you believe it or not.
There are those who argue that this school of thought is quackery, and contend that "real" Ayurveda is very different from the nonsense that Deepak Chopra feeds the public. What is interesting is that there actually is a pretty wide variety in the principles and what people prescribe. Some argue that all medicines should be in liquid form, some argue that all should be in whole food form, some argue that it doesn't matter. Some believe that adding heavy metals like gold and mercury (I wish I was kidding) to the tinctures will improve efficacy, others argue that wax/camphor will be more potent. Some will think the substances they sell alone will do the trick, others will lead you down dietary advice, and others still will prescribe yoga exercises to add onto the treatment. Worst of all is that they rarely agree on what should be offered for any particular condition. Now it's one thing for two different doctors to offer two different prescriptions or even differing diagnoses... it's another thing entirely for two different doctors to base their practice on entirely different principles and standards. Diagnostics is by nature ambiguous because a lot of our body's systems and chemistry is multifunctional. Any one substance, any one hormone, any one chemical serves more than one purpose in our bodies. This means in turn that it is entirely impossible to associate a given symptom with a single cause. Even a very complex mix of several symptoms can be linked to countless other causes. Narrowing down your diagnosis to something specific typically involves gathering more information than the obviously apparent symptoms. While two doctors may come to different conclusions, the idea of how they get there is basically the same. Ayurveda doesn't even have this sort of unified standard, so how on Earth is it trustworthy? Or more accurately, if there are indeed non-quacks among Ayurveds, how would you be able to tell? A real doctor at least has to be licensed to practice, and to work at a reputable hospital, certain standards must be maintained if a doctor is to continue to be able to provide care. Even an otherwise excellent doctor can have that license revoked for a single violation of basic rules and regulations... it seems harsh, but that is an institution in place to ensure that patients get care that meets a minimum bar of quality. Alternative practices have no such regulation. There is simply no concept of Ayurvedic malpractice, and they argue that it isn't even possible in the first place. I have heard countless times the argument that Ayurveda never has any side effects. Patients as well as practitioners say this to me all the time. This of course, is in every way impossible. Even if I were to ignore the people who practice the rasa shastra principle of adding heavy metals to their preparations (treating them as an anomaly), the multi-purpose nature of our body chemistry also means that if you have an effect on any one thing, it's going to also affect the other functions of that thing. There simply can never be a way around this. While this doesn't really cross the mind of a lot of people, people who should know better still spew this sort of tripe because they blindly accept anything Ayurvedic. I have people close to me who categorically reject all science-based medicine due to the influence of Ayurved family members.. some of whom actually make this claim of no side effects as if it is irrefutable fact in spite of the fact that they have knowledge and understanding of biochemistry which puts my own to shame (I am merely an engineer with an interest in math and science, not an actual scientist). Many of them most certainly know better than that, but the attachment to belief and tradition is stronger than fact. The simple truth is that Ayurveda is without a single shred of rigor in its principles, in its survey of facts, or in its testing. It's not that there are no side effects -- it's that there is no effort whatsoever in Ayurveda to even determine what side effects there would be. So as far as they are concerned, they just don't exist. Actual medicine reports side effects for every drug because they've actually gone through the trouble to verify their occurrence.
Now I happen to have in-laws who are Ayurvedic practitioners, and I am frank in my disapproval. Many would go as far as to blindly reject anything that science-based medicine proposes and only go with the Ayurvedic remedy. Within India, this has a tinge of nationalism to it because so much of scientific medical advancements came at the hands of post-industrial Western civilization, and the idea that this is the work of evil foreign minds creeps in rather than the idea that something should be evaluated based on its actual merits. To be fair, though, the practice of medicine is far more lax within India, so it is also difficult to pin down who to trust. Within the U.S., it happens because people are so terrified by the medical "establishment" that they distrust it implicitly and favor that which is so apparently different. Also, having a mechanism of being an "ancient" tradition as its mode of fake merit makes it easy for someone to hide lies about the process. Because Ayurveda is basically derived from centuries or even millennia-old notions collected about health and medicine and passed down either orally or through sparse and/or religious texts, it is easy to say that it holds a lot of things that it really doesn't. Either you can argue that we haven't fully come to understand the ancient writings in their full profundity (I feel the need to vomit when I hear this)... or you can claim that it had an outright cure for something science hasn't cured, but the corresponding texts have been mysteriously lost (which is basically just a bold-face lie wearing the "unfalsifiable" guise). It never really registers that this is basically no better than not having the knowledge at all, but it gives someone more comfort to believe that the answers are already there and we have to find it than to know that actual scientists are actually doing serious study on the subject to determine the answers. Well, that's what pseudoscience is good at -- claiming to have a "deeper" truth, but never actually demonstrating it.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they recoil in disgust away from Big Pharma and leap into the arms of Big Placebo is this idea that because the philosophies are fundamentally different, the nature of treatment is not only fundamentally different, but entirely mutually exclusive. Hence, why you might hear the sorts of insane claims about how they can cure things where "Western" medical doctors gave up. Stories of this nature are invariably outright lies. In fact, where Ayurvedic remedies have some demonstrable value, it is also demonstrable that it happens to agree with actual science-based medicine. This may include things like home remedies that involve something of known efficacy to modern science all the way up to procedures like rhinoplasty. The key difference is that Ayurveda has no explanation for why or how anything works which is even remotely grounded in fact. Actual medical science can tell you that home remedy A works because of X, Y, and Z, and if you're really curious enough to find out, you can find answers right down to the molecular level of detail. Pseudoscientific quackery like Ayurveda can at best offer nebulous images of energy states and often times, astrological influences and nonsense about chakras and doshas and built-up stress. There is simply not one whit of hope to get any real answer which actually has some facts. Most Ayurvedic remedies which do work are of the nature of things which people tried at home centuries ago and figured it worked for them, and that's usually the best answer that can be offered -- anecdotal evidence. Now while anecdotal evidence is, by nature, the weakest of all forms of evidence, the fact is that it does mean that compared to far more bizarre alt-med nonsense like homeopathy, Ayurveda probably has a slightly better record of efficacy. That is to be expected since it has a longer history behind it, and along the centuries, someone is bound to stumble upon something which is correct.
So then, who do you trust? Someone who makes mistakes, learns, and corrects their thinking along the way and rigorously tests their ideas, or someone who is right by accident?
