We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953887 and marked it off-topic.

These divisions are very important. As long as mystical beliefs towards Eastern thought are used to cause real harm through herbal remedies and supplements, the public must be taught to give it less importance. Among critical thinkers, it is valuable to look for similarities in scientific histories.

Last I checked homeopathy was western. i think your bias towards eastern medicine would be better founded if you were to say faith healing rather than eastern. Within eastern medicine one also finds people who used early forms of experimentation to derive working cures. Examples of working medical cures include boswellia used to treat bursitis, artemisin used to treat malaria. Also both Chinese and Indians had developed anaesthetic before Europeans. Similarly the procedure of rhinoplasty was developed in India. When the British came in western surgeons studied the technique and took it back to Europe. In fact hygiene was a critical part of the ayurvedic surgeons life well before Europeans realized the importance of hygiene in surgery. Of course there are a lot bogus stuff in eastern cures as well but in the west you have stuff like homeopathy. I think the key take away is that you cannot divide by east and west. We are after all human and each culture has their own contribution to the face of the earth.

You are trivializing the significant difference modern western science based medicine and earlier medicine. Of course people could come up with all sorts of practical solutions to various ailments and conditions through trial, error and observations. That however does not make it scientific. There is no scientific theory in you Chinese and Indian examples on which to make predictions and explanations. One example would be e.g. germ theory. It allows one to make predictions about things not yet observed. It helps explain why washing your hands is good. Now you can learn this from practical observations, but if you have no idea that the reason is due to germs being removed, then it prevents you from experimenting with and finding alternative cleaning agents or practices.

Western medicine is often found by trial and error too. Scientists perform tests of thousands of compounds just in case one of them happens to do something that might turn out to be useful. Some drugs are used to treat different diseases than what they were originally developed for because we noticed that patients with those other diseases mysteriously showed improvements. I can't think of which off the top of my head but perhaps a heart medicine that stopped baldness.

The key difference is western medicine is tested objectively, while traditional medicines are based on belief. A million people getting sick and taking a treatment and recovering doesn't mean the treatment does any good, but they'll believe it does because everyone else believes it too.

You're just arguing to argue. I didn't see any cognitive dissonance created in his comment.

It should be noted as well that the concept of the "Eastern" is also Western in origin.

A good read about this is Orientalism by Edward Said.

Exactly. I believe it is possible to synthesize the logic of the West and the intuition of the East.

Big Pharm and meat-based diet do a lot more harm to the entire biosphere and individuals than Ayurvedic medicine and yoga. Don't even get me started.

I don't know much about Eastern medicine outside of India to be honest. One exception: Chinese people buy tiger bone Viagra, elephant tusk art, rhino horn something, and shark fin soup.

I was born Hindu but became closer to Buddhist as I learned more about the scientific revolution and how it built the modern world.

Meat is unarguably bad, but the pharmaceuticals industry is the closest thing we have to a miracle factory. It has spared us from the miseries of polio, tuberculosis, smallpox, AIDS, surgery without anaesthetic and a thousand other horrors. Diseases that were once death sentences are now treatable with medications that cost pennies. Countless millions of lives have been saved by vaccination.

Ayurvedic medicine clearly does more harm than good. It has never been shown to be significantly more effective than placebo. Ayurveda poses a major risk of heavy metal poisoning, due to the pseudoscientific theories of rasa shastra.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755247/

Not all ayurvedic medicine require heavy metals. There are herbs like boswellia (now also an allopathic drug) that genuinely do what they are supposed to do. Ayurveda, prevented black death in India. Granted there is a lot of bs out there that gets passed of but there are parts that do work. Distilling these parts is important. I think the lack of quality control in eastern medicine is what has given it a bad name. Granted we don't have antibiotics or anti cancer drugs but there were surgical procedures like rhinoplasty that were successfully carried out. Of course any medicine that is 2000 years old is going to be nowhere near what modern medicine is because we have had 2000 years to evolve it. Reason why easterners set store by it is it provided a bit more protection than what the doctors of medieval Europe could do. 1000years is a long time and lots changes, sadly eastern medicine didn't.

I should explain more clearly that I am all for Western and Eastern medicine finding a middle path. What I am against and referring to is how agribusiness, poor nutrition, clever marketing, and healthcare (mostly disease-care) create a lot of needless suffering. A lot of prescriptions are only there to take care of health problems that could have been prevented with proper nutrition and a more integrated, instead of reductionist, model for medicine.

I think I should explain my thoughts on HN a little clearer going forward.

> Big Pharm and meat-based diet do a lot more harm to the entire biosphere and individuals than Ayurvedic medicine and yoga.

Cars kill more people per year than heroin, therefore heroin is healthier than cars.

Let's wait until pseudo-scientific treatments become multi-billion dollar industries and then we'll talk about what does more harm to what.

I'm not talking about pseudo-scientific anything dude.

1.) A meat-based diet is directly linked to higher cancer rates.

"The World Health Organization has determined that dietary factors account for at least 30 percent of all cancers in Western countries and up to 20 percent in developing countries. When cancer researchers started to search for links between diet and cancer, one of the most noticeable findings was that people who avoided meat were much less likely to develop the disease. Large studies in England and Germany showed that vegetarians were about 40 percent less likely to develop cancer compared to meat eaters."

http://www.pcrm.org/health/cancer-resources/diet-cancer/fact...

2.) A meat-based diet is directly linked to clearing wild habitat for more farm animals.

"Both the meat-based average American diet and the lactoovovegetarian diet require significant quantities of nonrenewable fossil energy to produce. Thus, both food systems are not sustainable in the long term based on heavy fossil energy requirements. However, the meat-based diet requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet.

The major threat to future survival and to US natural resources is rapid population growth. The US population of 285 million is projected to double to 570 million in the next 70 y, which will place greater stress on the already-limited supply of energy, land, and water resources. These vital resources will have to be divided among ever greater numbers of people."

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

3.) U.S. eats more meat than any nation on Earth and also has the most expensive health care in the world too, 20% of the GPD. We have a society whose delusions cause diseases and destruction around the world. If I was wrong, there wouldn't be so many brilliant scientists, doctors, artists, and entrepreneurs on this same train of thought.

4.) Yoga, meditation, plant-based diet have all played a major part in creating the modern world including computers and the internet. If people don't have discernment to know true from false, that is their shortcoming and not Dharma. ;)

You have not addressed my counter-argument. I'm not interested in defending "meat-based diets". I'm simply attacking your pseudo-medicine.

> We have a society whose delusions cause diseases and destruction around the world. If I was wrong, there wouldn't be so many brilliant scientists, doctors, artists, and entrepreneurs on this same train of thought.

Argumentum ad populum.

> Yoga, meditation, plant-based diet have all played a major part in creating [...] computers and the internet.

This is probably the most absurd statement I've read all week.

"Your" as in "the one you brought up".

What does history or the Bay Area have to do with this discussion?

What did I bring up again? I'm confused what this about at this point. I feel like you are trying to create cognitive dissonance where there is none.

Read these: https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...

https://www.amazon.com/Counterculture-Cyberculture-Stewart-N...

I'm talking about Ayurveda. To recap: you claimed that meat-based diets and pharmaceuticals cause more harm (in absolute terms) than Ayurveda, and I countered that the comparison is invalid because Ayurveda is practiced at a scale that's simply incomparable.

> 4.) Yoga, meditation, plant-based diet have all played a major part in creating the modern world including computers and the internet. If people don't have discernment to know true from false, that is their shortcoming and not Dharma. ;)

I was interested in your argument about meat and then I got to this, which immediately unraveled any point you had for me.

Investments in military technology played a major part in creating the modern world including computers and the Internet. That hippies were so intimately involved at a few important points is more a reflection of the time period and culture than causality, more an observation of the type of people drawn to the work for a season. Stating that we have the existence we have in large part because of yoga and meditation and not eating meat is so revisionist and misguided that I don't even know how to dispute it. I'm sorry, but that's just blatantly ridiculous because it's such a complete inversion of the actual truth.

That you take it further and imply someone is defective and invoke Dharma for believing otherwise is quite something. You should really bring it down a bit if you want your point to make sense, because you're coming across as far more arrogant than I think you intend.

Your missing the forest for the trees. I find many of the comments to my original comment to be very reductionist and misguided.

Semantics. What I typed, how he reacted, how I reacted, and now your reaction. We are so far from my original thought that I don't know how to respond. In fact, I think I'm going to stop here because I am wasting time talking about nothing of consequence.

Modern medicine, big Pharma and meat based diets are orthogonal to each other. Modern medicine has saved hundreds of millions of lives, while alternative medicine is leading people astray and ruining lives every day.

Sorry for the harsh words, but I've seen the damage, and I am tired of how alternative medicine is handled with silk gloves and shown infinite respect, in the name of being open minded.

A, you're wrong. Diet, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals are very interconnected. Also, adding pollution and climate change in there as well when you count land/water use and greenhouse gases produced by factory farming. Add advertising and lobbying in there as well, it's so effective you still think you're right.

B, the original comment was focused on taking what works from both and leaving the rest behind. You're making the same mistake as a billion other people...clinging to the paradigm you are currently in thinking there is nothing beyond it.

C, I'm tired of people thinking they are smart because they used the word 'orthogonal' and say things like 'sorry for the harsh words bro', which doesn't apply in this context and this is a pretty typical reddit/HN thread. Do you have any original insights into any of this or are you just gonna drop more vocab words and 'harsh words'?

anecdotal but had chronic sinusitis , allopathy mentioned only surgery as last option and that would also comeback after 5 to 6 years added sleep apnea. 3 months of regular Ayurveda and 12 days intense treatment. No issues now and very happy.