Ayurveda (/ˌɑːjʊərˈveɪdə, -ˈviː-/)[1] is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent.[2] The theory and practice of Ayurveda are pseudoscientific.[3][4][5] The Indian Medical Association describes Ayurvedic practitioners who claim to practice medicine as quacks.[6] Ayurveda is heavily practiced in India and Nepal, where around 80% of the population report using it.[7][8][9] 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.[10][11] Ayurvedic preparations are typically based on complex herbal compounds, minerals, and metal substances (perhaps under the influence of early Indian alchemy or rasashastra). Ancient Ayurveda texts also taught surgical techniques, including rhinoplasty, kidney stone extractions, sutures, and the extraction of foreign objects.[12][13] The main classical Ayurveda texts begin with accounts of the transmission of medical knowledge from the gods to sages, and then to human physicians.[14] Printed editions of the Sushruta Samhita (Sushruta's Compendium), frame the work as the teachings of Dhanvantari, Hindu god of Ayurveda, incarnated as King Divodāsa of Varanasi, to a group of physicians, including Sushruta.[15][16] The oldest manus of the work, however, omit this frame, ascribing the work directly to King Divodāsa.[17] Through well-understood processes of modernization and globalization, Ayurveda has been adapted for Western consumption, notably by Baba Hari Dass in the 1970s and Maharishi Ayurveda in the 1980s.[18] Some scholars assert that Ayurveda originated in prehistoric times[19] but historical evidence for ayurvedic texts, terminology and concepts appears only from the middle of the first millennium BCE onwards.[20]

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