Ayurveda medicine is a very comprehensive medicine system that is more that 5,000 years old, that is based on a holistic medicine approach that has its roots in Vedic Culture. Inside the word Ayurveda you will see the word "veda", which means knowledge, tells us it's important role in ancient hinduism. Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita are two early texts of Ayurveda. There use to be a tradition of surgery associated with ayurveda.
For the most part Ayurvedic therapies are herbal compounds. This is largerly due to it's ancient roots. In later times alchemical preparations start to enter the ayurvedic pharmacopieia. Ayurveda also provides therapies to treat different vegetable and animal toxins. Examples of this are things like snake, spider and scorpion venom. In fact there is an entire branch of Ayurvedic medicine that deals with the science of toxicology.
The main idea behind Ayurveda is that an organsism adapts to the food and its environment. By then introducing small quantaties of food and or medicine, the organism can adapt to it and learn to resist it. This is quite a basic principle and illustrates the complexity of the immune system and of the body as a whole.
The information provided above is only a breif look at the medicine, and some of it's qualities and idea's. Ayurveda is an extremely interesting form of medicine; it is easy to see why it has stayed with us over the past 5000 years!