Traditional medicine (especially Ayurvedic medicine) was taken by Indian nationalism as a synecdoche for traditional culture. In the face of European claims for scientific and technological preeminence, Indian thinkers such as Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Radakrishnan, accepted European representations of Indian thinking as mystic and intuitive, to define it as distinctive of Indian identity, both as effective as Western scientific discourse and complementary to it. Ayurvedic medicine was regarded by some scholars as the leading field where the Indian ability to produce scientifically effective knowledge expressed itself. Reinterpretations of traditional medical concepts by means of biomedical theories helped to see them as grounded in natural prescriptions, instead of social rules, given by Ayurvedic texts. This accounts for the increasing interest that Ayurvedic medicine arouses in Western countries, especially among those who wish values to be reintroduced into biomedical theory.