Ayurvedic medicine for plantar fasciitis

Ayurveda

Pseudoscientific alternative medicine originating from India

Ayurveda (/ˌɑːjʊərˈveɪdə, -ˈviː-/ AH-yoor-VAY-də, -⁠VEE-; IAST: āyurveda)^[1] is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent.^[2] It is heavily practised throughout India and Nepal, where as much as 80% of the population report using ayurveda.^[3][4][5][6] Ayurveda has been adapted for Western consumption, notably by Baba Hari Dass in the 1970s and Maharishi ayurveda in the 1980s. The theory and practice of ayurveda are pseudoscientific,^[7][8] and many ayurvedic preparations, particularly in the rasashastra tradition, contain toxic levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic.^[9][10] There is no evidence that cancer can be treated or cured through ayurveda.^[11]

Ayurveda therapies have varied and evolved over more than two millennia.^[2] Therapies include herbal medicines, special diets, meditation, yoga, massage, laxatives, enemas, and medical oils.^[12][11] Early ayurvedic preparations were almost entirely based on complex herbal compounds based on the materia medica of South Asia.^[13] Minerals and other metal substances began to enter the traditional pharmacopoeia more pervasively after the eleventh century, under the influence of early Indian alchemy or rasashastra.^[14] Ancient ayurveda texts also taught surgical techniques, including rhinoplasty,^[15] lithotomy, sutures, cataract surgery,^[16][17] and the extraction of foreign objects.^[18][19]

Historical evidence for ayurvedic terminology and concepts appear in the Buddhist Canon from the middle of the first millennium BCE onwards.^[20] The main classical ayurveda texts are datable in their present form to the first centuries CE.^[20] Like many texts from classical antiquity, these texts begin with accounts of the transmission of medical knowledge from the gods to sages and then to human physicians.^[21] Printed editions of the Sushruta Samhita (Sushruta's Compendium), frame the work as the teachings of Dhanvantari, the Hindu deity of ayurveda, incarnated as King Divodāsa of Varanasi, to a group of physicians, including Sushruta.^[22][23] The oldest manuscripts of the work, however, omit this frame, ascribing the work directly to King Divodāsa.^[24]

In ayurveda texts, dosha balance is emphasised, and suppressing natural urges is considered unhealthy and claimed to lead to illness.^[25] Ayurveda treatises describe three elemental doshas: vāta, pitta and kapha, and state that balance (Skt. sāmyatva) of the doshas results in health, while imbalance (viṣamatva) results in disease. Ayurveda treatises divide medicine into eight canonical components. Ayurveda practitioners had developed various medicinal preparations and surgical procedures from at least the beginning of the common era.^[26]

1. ^ "Ayurveda". Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 10 December 2016.
2. ^ ^{a b} Meulenbeld, Gerrit Jan (1999). "Introduction". A History of Indian Medical Literature. Groningen: Egbert Forsten. ISBN 978-90-6980-124-7.
3. ^ Cite error: The named reference who01 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
4. ^ "Backgrounder. Ayurvedic Mecicine: an Introduction" (PDF). US Department of Health and Human Services. GovInfo: Discover U.S. Government Information. 2009. D287. Retrieved 3 June 2024.
5. ^ Cite error: The named reference The Himalayan Times-2013 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Alam-2008 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
7. ^ Beall, Jeffrey (2018). "Scientific soundness and the problem of predatory journals". In Kaufman, Allison B.; Kaufman, James C. (eds.). Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science. MIT Press. p. 293. ISBN 978-0-262-03742-6. Archived from the original on 7 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2020. Ayurveda, a traditional Indian medicine, is the subject of more than a dozen, with some of these 'scholarly' journals devoted to Ayurveda alone ..., others to Ayurveda and some other pseudoscience. ... Most current Ayurveda research can be classified as 'tooth fairy science,' research that accepts as its premise something not scientifically known to exist. ... Ayurveda is a long-standing system of beliefs and traditions, but its claimed effects have not been scientifically proven. Most Ayurveda researchers might as well be studying the tooth fairy. The German publisher Wolters Kluwer bought the Indian open-access publisher Medknow in 2011. ... It acquired its entire fleet of journals, including those devoted to pseudoscience topics such as An International Quarterly Journal of Research in Ayurveda.
8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Quack-2011 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Dargan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
10. ^ Saper, Robert B. (27 August 2008). "Lead, Mercury, and Arsenic in US- and Indian-Manufactured Ayurvedic Medicines Sold via the Internet". JAMA. 300 (8): 915–923. doi:10.1001/jama.300.8.915. ISSN 0098-7484. PMC 2755247. PMID 18728265.
11. ^ ^{a b} Cite error: The named reference cruk was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
12. ^ Cite error: The named reference WebMD was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
13. ^ Khare, C. P., ed. (2004). Indian Herbal Remedies. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-18659-2. ISBN 978-3-642-62229-8.
14. ^ Wujastyk, Dagmar, ed. (17 October 2025). Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts (1 ed.). Oxford University PressNew York, NY. doi:10.1093/9780197805831.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-780583-1.
15. ^ Wujastyk, Dominik; Birch, Jason; Klebanov, Andrey; Parameswaran, Madhu K.; Rimal, Madhusudan; Chakraborty, Deepro; Bhatt, Harshal; Lele, Vandana; Mehta, Paras (2023). On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose. Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing. doi:10.11588/hasp.1203.
16. ^ Leffler, Christopher T.; Klebanov, Andrey; Samara, Wasim A.; Grzybowski, Andrzej (2020). "The history of cataract surgery: from couching to phacoemulsification". Annals of Translational Medicine. 8 (22): 1551–1551. doi:10.21037/atm-2019-rcs-04. PMC 7729313.
17. ^ Leffler, Christopher T. (2024). History of Cataract Surgery - The History of Ophthalmology. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Kugler Publications. ISBN 978-90-6299-949-1.
18. ^ Wujastyk 2003a.
19. ^ Mukhopadhyaya, Girindranath (1913). The Surgical Instruments of the Hindus, with a Comparative Study of the Surgical Instruments of the Greek, Roman, Arab, and the Modern European Surgeons. Calcutta: Calcutta University. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
20. ^ ^{a b} Meulenbeld, Gerrit Jan (1999). A history of Indian medical literature. Groningen: Egbert Forsten. pp. passim. ISBN 90-6980-124-8. LCCN 2001449327. OCLC 42207455. OL 23870494M.
21. ^ Zysk, Kenneth G. (1999). "Mythology and the Brāhmaṇization of Indian medicine: Transforming Heterodoxy into Orthodoxy". In Josephson, Folke (ed.). Categorisation and Interpretation. Meijerbergs institut för svensk etymologisk forskning, Göteborgs universitet. pp. 125–145. ISBN 978-91-630-7978-8.
22. ^ Bhishagratna, Kaviraj Kunjalal (1907). An English Translation of the Sushruta Samhita Based on Original Sanskrit text. Calcutta: K. K. Bhishagratna. p. 1. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
23. ^ "Dhanvantari. (2010). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 4 August 2010, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 27 April 2015. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
24. ^ Birch, Jason; Wujastyk, Dominik; Klebanov, Andrey; Parameswaran, Madhu; Rimal, Madhusudan; Chakraborty, Deepro; Bhatt, Harshal; Shenoy, Devyani; Lele, Vandana (2021). "Further Insight into the Role of Dhanvantari, the physician to the gods, in the Suśrutasaṃhitā". Academia Letters. doi:10.20935/al2992. S2CID 238681626. Archived from the original on 15 April 2023. Retrieved 2 May 2022.
25. ^ Cite error: The named reference WujastykXVIII was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
26. ^ Sharma, Priya Vrat (1992). History of Medicine in India. New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy.

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