Amazon to build its own consumer hardware in India, starting with Fire TV sticks

Amazon.com will make some of its own-brand electronic in India. The e-commerce giant’s decision is significant because in June 2020 India’s government announced a policy aimed at making electronics manufacturing the nation’s largest industry. That policy called for five “global champions” to manufacture in in India, both for …

[iron]

> Prasad called on Amazon to work with digital villages to help local businesses sell their... ayurvedic medicinal products

The Indian Medical Association characterises the practice of modern medicine by Ayurvedic practitioners as quackery. (source Wikipedia)

Great! Just what we need, more snake oil salesmen.

[IanD]

however...

... if they sell more than three units through the Bezos Howling Void Portal (tm)(c), they'll mysteriously become AmazonSnakeOil (c) and those pesky villagers will be back to back-breaking manual labour and grinding poverty again. Minister then retires to luxury UAE apartment on Palm Oil Island

[Raj]

Ah Wikipedia! You should read what the IMA link from there actually says:

http://www.ima-india.org/ima/left-side-bar.php?pid=291

It says quacks practice various medical activities, including Ayurveda. Did you have trouble with understanding that ? Still going to insist the actual field is quackery ? Fine.

The NIH supports quackery:

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/ayurvedic-medicine-in-depth

And John Hopkins:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/ayurveda

So does the NHS:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/03/19/nhs-trial-ayurvedic-herbal-remedy-cut-antibiotics-coughs-colds/

And Cancer Research UK

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-general/treatment/complementary-alternative-therapies/individual-therapies/ayurvedic-medicine

Tsk tsk. Got your task cut out for you to convince them otherwise. Use wikipedia. That'll help you.

[IanD]

You seem to be mistakenly implying Cancer UK support the use of Ayurvedic medicince, which is simply not true.

From the Cancer Research UK website:

"There is no reliable evidence to support its use as a treatment for cancer"

"Research is looking into whether some herbs or plant treatments used in Ayurvedic medicine could help to prevent or treat cancer.

But, we still don't know much about some of the treatments that are part of Ayurvedic medicine. These include treatments like special diets and herbal remedies.

These treatments could be harmful to your health or interfere with conventional treatment such as cancer drugs and radiother

[Raj]

Let me define quackery for you, since you're dancing around it, off Brittanica.com

Quackery: the characteristic practice of quacks or charlatans, who pretend to knowledge and skill that they do not possess, particularly in medicine.

In other words, Cancer Research UK explicitly lists something that the original commentator asserts is quackery. Therefore, if he is true, Cancer Research UK explicitly is ok with listing information about practices that allegedly constitute quackery.

The reality is that the other commenter is dead wrong. He quoted wikipedia, which got its facts wrong. He didn't even read the linked IMA document, which if he did, he did not understand.

Ayurveda, like Chinese Traditional Medicine, is an alternative traditional medicine system that's been around for a few millenia. Its uses and constraints are well known within India, and it is incredibly popular. Passing it off as quackery because one can't be bothered to read the very material they quote is dumb.

[IanD]

By listing the practice, Cancer Research UK is not condoning it. There are a lot of people affected by cancers who investigate such practices, quite often as by that time most other mainstream treatments have failed, so it is good that Cancer Research make it clear they do not condone those practices.

Only two ayurvedic products have been studied in more than a casual meaningless way (89 people in a trial is not a validating study) to provide some sort of useful application. A system of medicine of such an age that has produced two products is not a great track record. If you can point me at any others done by qualified organisations I'd be interested, but otherwise I'll stick with not taking untested products, thanks.

[Raj]

You’re busy beating up your own straw man entirely unrelated to the original response I made .The original contention was straightforward- “Ayurveda is quackery” . None of what you said has anything to do with it.

What you’re doing is arguing that the only form of medicine is modern medicine. That’s untrue and all those websites prove you wrong.

Your entire argument is about the fact that Ayurveda - and you can apply that same standard to every other system of traditional medicine - does not follow the statistical basis of modern medicine. Well no shit , it’s traditional medicine.

More fundamentally it is still medicine - if it was quackery then NIH, NHS, ICMR, JHU, Mayo Clinic and wouldn’t be listing it with information on how to utilize it. If they were offering informative data on quackery they’d have pages on ‘radium water’ too.