You made a specific statement that modern medicine is a "poison", according to the logic of ayurveda, because it is a treatment which is neither food nor herb.

Do you still regard modern medicine as "poison"? If so, does that word have any meaning other than "a treatment which isn't a food or an herb"? Are ultrasound treatments poison? And, are the ayurvedic categories useful for anything other than arbitrary labels? If so, how does knowledge of the categories affect treatment outcomes?

Western medicine doesn't reduce things into three different categories. Each type of molecule, and each combination of types, and each dosage, can have a different effect on different people. I am aligned with that more complicated view, and believe that those three labels you mentioned are worthless when it comes to categorizing treatments.

As to beriberi in Asia, I researched it before I posted my comment which is why I wrote, "For several thousand years, beriberi was endemic in Asia, because polished white rice was a staple food."

Here's one of the references I used: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889456/ , in looking specifically on the history of beriberi in India. It's a complicated history, mixed in with colonialism, and racism between English, Indian, and Chinese populations. But you'll have to tell me - what was the pre-1900 ayurvedic treatment for beriberi in India, where definitely there were many people in India who suffered from the disease, but before Western medicine found that it was a vitamin deficiency? My prediction is that ayurveda had no effective treatment for beriberi.

I disagree quite strongly with your claim that the western model is "finding and curing diseases, not concentrating on health."

How are fluoridated water, vitamin D in milk, iodine in salt, and enriched flour not prime examples of 'western medicine' using diet supplements to improve public health by preventing disease through improved diet?

Let's take rickets as an example. What's the historical ayurvedic treatment for rickets, and how does it distinguish between the different types of rickets? (I have to say 'historical' since it doesn't mean much if the ayurvedic treatment derived from Western knowledge, would it?)

I easily found http://books.google.com/books?id=qbNK6dn_FKIC&pg=PA98...

which offers some medical advice, but it's wrong advice. Those oil massages (well, it is a massage book) don't appear to contain vitamin D, and in any case, vitamin D must be ingested to work. Also, while it suggests exposure to sunlight, which is one valid treatment, it suggests infra-red light as an alternative, which is wrong. Vitamin D production in the skin requires UV, not infrared.

I also found http://india.mapsofindia.com/indian-medicines/ which suggests Arbindasava - "Effective in rickets and other diseases like fever, cough and constipation" Arbindasava seems to be a general tonic. Or what I'll say is snake oil, given the diseases it claims to cure.

A problem, of course, is that there are several different ways to get rickets. Vitamin D diet deficiency is one, but some people can't process vitamin D from the diet so need exposure to sunlight. (Which I mentioned earlier.) What are the ayurvedic recommendations for these different types of rickets? Are those types based on Western research knowledge or were they known pre-1900?

You say there's "a lot of knowledge of curing through herbs." (Incidentally, I see that "curing" is now important, when you wrote that we should concentrate on health.) The Ancient Greeks had a lot of knowledge about curing. That doesn't mean their knowledge was correct, and it doesn't mean that they knew something better than we know now.

Similarly, you've made a claim, but where's the evidence? How did you determine if ayurvedic knowledge makes an effective improvement to public health, compared to western medicine? Or even that the synthesis of ayurvedic and western knowledge leads to improved health?

I think you'll say that you know people who have gotten better because of ayurvedic recommendations. As I've commented before in this thread, that's not enough. You have to know how many people didn't get better, and you have to know how many got better, or didn't get better, using western medicine. Otherwise your observations, while entirely accurate, suffer from a strong bias which makes it less convincing.

If you don't know the failure rates, then you don't have evidence.