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unani tibb medicine
Toothache is “Waja ‘ al-Asnan”. Its causes include one or more of
Impairment of the hot temperament, gum inflammation
Impairment of the cold temperament of the tooth and/or nerve.
Inflammation of the blood temperament
Phlegmatic gases
Excess Yellow Bile
Lack of oral hygiene
Indigestion
Gout
Excessive use of sweet and sour foods,
Pregnancy
Accumulation of putrefied humours in the stomach.
Treatment, based on diagnosis, is usually with the opposite.
Joint pain “Waja -al -mafasil” is common in elders but may start earlier if there is one or more of:
Phlegm (mucus) imbalance
Obesity
Indigestion
Prolonged exposure to cold conditions
Prolonged exposure to damp conditions
Prolonged exposure to humid conditions
Pain is due to stagnation of bad humour. Interesting, the Chinese Medicine system sees pain as cold/blockage.
A 28 March 2020 post by Hakim M. Salim Khan M.D. (M.A.) M.H. F.G.N.I. D.O. Principal of the College of Medicine and Healing Arts on his website said,
“We often hear on the news and through the health services that the most vulnerable people to Covid-19 are, for example:
Those with heart diseases.
Those with lung and respiratory diseases.
Those with weak/compromised immune systems.
The elderly.
Congruent with this, Unani Tibb: Whole-Person Healthcare and Medicine can provide further insight using the time-tested wisdom-based understanding of the four temperaments.
Each person is assessed according to their own unique, individual combination of energetic qualities (the above diagram shows each category of temperament, the season it corresponds to, and its energetic qualities.)
According to this understanding, flu-like symptoms are usually the result of a temperamentally cold condition. This means that those with Phlegmatic (winter) and Melancholic (autumn) temperaments need to take extra care when it comes to diseases of this nature.”
Dry cupping is often mistakenly thought of as not hijama but as part of the Chinese Medicine system. Dry cupping is “Hijamah Bila Shurt” (cupping without cuts) and is a form of Unani treatment based on evidence from the time of Hippocrates (Buqrat).
The suction causes lower air pressure across the skin and the capillaries below. This impacts on interstitial fluids, blood circulation and waste secretion. It is a treatment based on “Imala”. That is, moving morbid matter from one part of the body, to aid excretion.
Avicenna in the Canon of Medicine said,
“Exercise and heating agents set in motion the sanguineous humour, the bilious humour, and even the atrabilious humour (which is strengthened thereby).
“Repose sets the serous humour in motion and strengthens it. Repose also strengthens some kinds of atrabilious humour.
“Even imagination, emotional states and other agents cause, the humours to move. Thus, if one were to gaze intently at something red, one would cause the sanguineous humour to move. That is why one must not let a person suffering from nose-bleeding see things of a brilliant red colour.”
Avicenna in the Canon of Medicine said,
“Some think that strength of body depends on abundance of blood; that weakness is associated with paucity of blood. But it is not so.”
“It is rather this, that the state of the body determines whether the nutriment will be beneficial to it or not.”
“Others again, believe that whether the humours be increased or lessened in amount, the maintenance of health depends on the preservation of a certain quantitative proportion between the several humours, one to another, peculiar to the human body. But that is not exactly correct.”
“The humours must, besides that, maintain a certain constant quantity. It is not a matter of the composition of one or other humour, but of (the body) itself; but the proportions which they bear one to another must also be preserved.”
In Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, he says,
“we have only to consider what the stomach contains—phlegm, bile, pneuma, [innate] heat, and, indeed the whole substance of the stomach. And if one considers along with this the adjacent viscera, like a lot of burning hearths around a great cauldron—to the right the liver, to the left the spleen, the heart above, and along with it the diaphragm (suspended and in a state of constant movement), and the omentum sheltering them all—you may believe what an extraordinary alteration it is which occurs in the food taken into the stomach.
In Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, he says,
“For the same reason [against pouring boiling water on honey], [honey]is easily transmuted into bile in those people who are naturally warm, or in their prime, since warm when associated with warm becomes readily changed into a disproportionate combination and turns into bile sooner than into blood. Thus we need a cold temperament and a cold period of life if we would have honey brought to the nature of blood.
“Therefore, Hippocrates not improperly advised those who were naturally choleric [bilious][hot/dry] not to take honey, since they were obviously of too warm a temperament. “
“So also, not only Hippocrates, but all physicians say that honey is bad in bilious [hot/dry] diseases but good in old age; some of them having discovered this through the indications afforded by its nature, and others simply through experiment … honey is good for an old man and not for a young one, that it is harmful for those who are naturally bilious [hot/dry], and serviceable for those who are phlegmatic [cold/wet]. “
“In a word, in bodies which are warm either through nature, disease, time of life, season of the year, locality, or occupation, honey is productive of bile, whereas in opposite circumstances it produces blood.”
In Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, he says,
“And if you will boil honey itself, far the sweetest of all things, you can demonstrate that even this becomes quite bitter. For what may occur as a result of boiling in the case of other articles which are not warm by nature, exists naturally in honey; for this reason it does not become sweeter on being boiled, since exactly the same quantity of heat as is needed for the production of sweetness exists from beforehand in the honey.
“Therefore the external heat, which would be useful for insufficiently warm substances, becomes in the honey a source of damage, in fact an excess; and it is for this reason that honey, when boiled, can be demonstrated to become bitter sooner than the others.”
In his Introduction to Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, Arthur John Brock, the translator noted that,
“Greek medicine spread, with general Greek culture, throughout Syria, and from thence was … eventually spread to the [Muslim] world. Several of the Prophet’s [peace be upon him] successors (such as the Caliphs Harun-al-Rashid and Abdul-Rahman III) were great patrons of Greek learning, and especially of medicine. The Arabian scholars imbibed Aristotle and Galen with avidity.”
“Avicenna (Ibn Sina), (10th to 11th century) is the foremost name in Arabian medicine: his “Book of the Canon in Medicine,” when translated into Latin, even overshadowed the authority of Galen himself for some four centuries. Of this work [it was said]: “Avicenna, according to his lights, imparted to contemporary medical science the appearance of almost mathematical accuracy…””
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"Clorion"/Scan by NLM [Public domain]
In his Introduction to Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, Arthur John Brock, the translator, noted that,
“If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of Galen, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit or apex of the same edifice. Galen’s merit is to have crystallised or brought to a focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages.”
And perhaps one can say, below that foundation, an ancient admonition to the medical practitioners,
“Be [as] wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
To Hippocrates,
“a disease was essentially a process, one and indivisible, and thus his practical problem was essentially one of prognosis, “what will be the natural course of this disease, if left to itself?””
And so,
“Observation taught Hippocrates to place unbounded faith in the recuperative powers of the living organism —in what we sometimes call nowadays the ‘vis medicatrix Naturae’ [written in 1916, so, what we would now call “the healing power of nature” and in Tibb as “physis” or “tabiya”]. His observation was that even with a very considerable “abnormality” of environmental stress the organism, in the large majority of cases, manages eventually by its own inherent powers to adjust itself to the new conditions. “Merely give Nature a chance,” said the father of medicine in effect, “and most diseases will cure themselves.” And accordingly, his treatment was mainly directed towards “giving Nature a chance.””
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"Clorion"/Scan by NLM [Public domain]
