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Our Science
There is a comfortable version of this conversation in which ancient wisdom and modern science are said to agree, and everyone moves on. It is not true often enough to be useful.
Our position
Most published work on Ayurvedic herbs is preclinical — cell cultures and animal models. Where human trials exist, they are frequently small, short, single-site, and conducted with the involvement of extract manufacturers. None of that makes the findings worthless. It does mean they are routinely described as far more conclusive than they are.
Our position is that traditional practice is an enormous, carefully observed record of what people noticed over centuries: an excellent source of hypotheses and a poor source of proof. Everything below follows from treating it that way.
How a formulation is built
01
We begin where the classical texts do — what a herb was used for, how it was prepared, and in what combination. This is a hypothesis, and we treat it as one.
02
We read what has actually been studied: sample sizes, durations, design, replication, and who funded the work. Most herbs have considerably less behind them than the market implies.
03
Species verification before anything else. Misidentification during wild collection is a documented cause of harm, and no downstream testing corrects for the wrong plant.
04
A compound that cannot be absorbed is a number on a label. Where a constituent has known bioavailability problems, formulation has to address it rather than ignore it.
05
Every decision is written up on the product page. If we cannot explain a choice in plain language, we take it as evidence that the choice was not well made.
Where this stops
A method is worth reading in proportion to what it admits it leaves out. The entries below are outside ours, and each is the kind of gap that closes with time and material rather than with better writing.
The limits
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