hi again valarie (got back to you eventually...),

re: "to 'Believe' is to have confidence in the truth of a thing"

yes i agree. however, it is quite possible for a person can "have
confidence in the truth of a thing" even if they are wrong. for
example, for hundreds of years, people believed that the sun revolved
around the earth. we now know that this is wrong (even if the
vatican has only recently admitted this!) . traditionally in europe,
doctors thought that blood was static in the body (it didn't
circulate) and believed countless other things that often seemed to
work at the time but were later proved wrong through scientific
methods. with this in mind, i'd rather have confidence in the truth
of a thing because i can prove that it is right rather than .

re: "Ayurveda has a scientific foundation. One that extends back
thousands of years... Science
as defined in the US has a different meaning & approach as to that
applied in the Orient.".

ayurveda is not science as i understand the word, ie it doesn't deal
with objective facts that can checked, tested and verified. we have
to take it on faith that prana etc exists, or judge from the results
with no proof that it was actually ayurveda that made the results
happen.

i do conceed, however that western science is not "finished" or
complete". it is constantly evolving and changing its mind. the fact
that western science does not recognise ayurveda and cannot measure
things like prana may point to deficiency with science rather than in
ayurveda. it's just that i find it hard to believe something purely
on faith

re: holism, yes i agree with you that western medicine is often not
very holistic, and i think that it should put more stress (excuse the
pun) on relaxation of body and mind, prevention, self-help and so on,
and less on as you said the short-sighted "cure-the-symptom-not-the-
cause approach". and your example of doctors and nutrition was a
very good one. i agree totally. however, i don't think that this is
a problem with western medicine per se, but more in the way that it
is practiced. western medicine has, in a sense become a victim of
its own success; it has accumilated so much knowledge and
understanding that specialisation / compartmentalisation has become a
neccesity. however, there is no theoretical reason why people from
different specialisations within western medicine cannot work
together, and in fact they often do (ie, referals). though, i agree
not nearly as much as they could. to put it this way, who would you
rather build or fix your motor car; a single designer / mechanic or a
team of people each specialising in different parts (ie the engine,
the computers, the suspension etc)? or does it matter? surely the
depth of knowledge would be greater if several experts worked
together?

re: "not sure you need to dissect a body to learn massage" :) no i
have no plans to rob any graves at the moment! what i meant was that
western scientists have literally taken the human body apart to see
how it works and have carried out numerous studies on the living.
this gives people like massage therapists and doctors (who use this
knowledge) a much stronger grounding in objective facts re: the body
than ayurveda or tcm. if a mechanic fixes your car, wouldn't you
expect him to know his way around an engine? if he said he was
fixing something that neither of you could see wouldn't you feel a
bit worried?

anyway, i haven't stopped thinking about this topic, and i'm sure
that my knowledge and opinions will evolve and change as time goes
by. this has been a very thought provoking disussion.

thanks, dan :)