Canon Of Medicine Quotes

Because it may be fine to die in the open, with one’s body still young and healthy amidst the triumphant echoes of the bugles; but it is a sadder fate to die of wounds in a hospital ward after long sufferings, and it is more melancholy still to meet one’s end in one’s bed at home in the midst of fond laments, dim lights and medicine bottles. But nothing is more difficult than to die in some strange, indifferent spot, in the characterless bed of an inn, to die there old and worn and leave no one behind in the world.

Antibiotics, viral tabs, painkillers, sterilisation spray,” Kasyanov said. “Other stuff. Bandages, medicines, contraceptives. Hoop raised an eyebrow. “Hey. Forever is a long time.

As the reader will discover in this book, problems that affect the mitochondria are the basic cause of disease; as Avicenna long ago stated in the 3rd Lesson, 2nd Art, “When the organ function becomes abnormal, then there is a problem with its energy, and a problem with organ’s energy causes a disease in the organ.

Few exchanges in the history of science have leaped so boldly into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now often dismissed as a backwater and valued mainly for its natural resources, not its intellectual achievements. We know of it because copies survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-eight-year-old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, or simply Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His younger counterpart, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or just Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), grew up in the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He was to make his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and music theory. When eventually Ibn Sina’s magisterial Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today. Many regard Biruni and Ibn Sina together as the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance, if not the modern age.

The effect of the current WMS paradigm on the pharmaceutical industry turned out to be catastrophic (for the patient). The rash of drug recalls that has been beleaguering the pharmaceutical industry in the last twenty years is a direct manifestation of drug design based on an incomplete and often incorrect biological and clinical paradigm. Why has the pharmaceutical industry not been capable of producing new drugs that are safe and without severe side effects, that would represent true “therapeutic breakthroughs,” like we were used to seeing in the middle of the twentieth century? Why are the “blockbuster” drugs of recent decades not the safe, therapeutic “breakthroughs” our parents had come to trust in?

Like other traditional medical systems, Unani follows a holistic approach to health maintenance, diagnosis of illness, and restoration of health. As a holistic system, it recognizes all factors that contribute to a healthy body, it promotes the natural recuperative power of the body, and it avoids harming sound parts of the body when pursuing treatment options for a disease.

The physicians and philosophers of traditional medical systems were aware of the physical nature of chemical elements such as iron, arsenic, and others as well as their characteristics, but they still used the four-element concept for its relevance to explaining medical and biological phenomena.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the revisiting of cellular energetics to explain issues with cancer, degenerative disease, and drug toxicities.

it is appropriate to quote Gruner, who wrote, “Advances of modern sciences in molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and pharmacology have not replaced or diminished the basic tenets of Avicenna’s system; to the contrary, they have revealed to us the need to explain them in light of the new knowledge and find a way to reconcile the two.

However, the four-elements concept is a different system of classification of matter than is our periodic table of elements; it is based on the physical state (solid, liquid, gas, energy), acceptance or rejection of moisture (wet, dry), acceptance or rejection of heat (hot, cold), and relationship to other elements (inner, middle, outer, mixed). Why is such a classification needed? The answer is simple: because it is compatible with the biological nature of living organisms. The physical state, heat, and water are three criteria that can describe the conditions of a biological entity—organs, structures, biochemical compounds, liquids, and such.

There are thousands of unknown compounds in the human body that have not yet been identified, and their abnormal qualitative and quantitative changes that contribute to disease have not yet been explored.

Raw humor is a quality issue that has to be dealt with; the quality of the humor, or a metabolite in our modern biology, is an important factor in health preservation, a fact that is rarely given attention when merely measuring the quantity of a biomolecule. In a Western-type clinical environment, the physician or nurse may not be aware of this issue since all blood indicators they deal with are quantitative and only measured in the blood, the assessment and treatment is based on whether the test results show above or below the normal range. According to Avicenna, in many instances the raw humor may be higher in concentration within the organ, and not within the vessels, and its effect is local rather than systemic.

Aging and dying are still enigmatic on the molecular scale to modern sciences. However, Avicenna had the broad concept figured out, and his explanation is congruent with our recent knowledge, and with new facts at hand we now can explain his reasoning at the cellular and biochemical levels. Avicenna states, “After the period of youth heat starts to diminish due to the decline in moisture, and in agreement with the internal innate heat and support of physical and psychological actions that are needed, therefore, in the absence of a natural reversal, all bodily functions reach their end

It is worth mentioning here that the Western translations of traditional medical systems have always referred to the basic constituents of biological entities as the elements, however, in the tibb system they are termed the basics, origins (‘ousoul, ), or phases, and never as elements. It was the Greek-Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (ca. 450 BCE) who termed the elements the four “roots” (rhizōmata, ιζματα)—a very close term to the Arabic term for origins. Plato seems to have been the one who introduced the term element (stoicheion, στοιχεον). We are using the term elements here because it is ubiquitous in the literature and used to refer to the same concept in Chinese traditional medicine and ayurvedic medicine. Although the ancients’ concepts

There are many today who dismiss the classical elements theory of the ancient systems as inaccurate and as being in conflict with our current understanding of elemental physics, however, as we will try to demonstrate in this book there is not a real conflict and understanding the Unani elements in a modern biological and biochemical context makes good sense. We will attempt to place this concept within its proper context, provide its relevance within the biological and medical paradigm, and explain how the elements became an integral part of the theoretical and practical basis of the Unani medical system.

Unani physicians practice individualized medicine, an idea that has just started to take hold in modern medicine but is without solid practice yet.

within the Unani paradigm, Avicenna had long ago given us an accurate general understanding of cancer’s biochemistry that is compatible with our recent findings about cancer and, in a step far ahead of its time, prescribed a suitable diet for individuals with cancer that is consistent with the ketogenic diet (calorie-restricted diet with high-fat and high-protein content) that is now emerging as the most suitable diet for cancer patients. This last point tells us that one may find some remedies in Unani medicine for certain ailments that the WMS does not offer.

While the WMS views the invasion and establishment of a pathogen as the beginning of the disease, Unani attributes the success of the pathogen to the individual’s susceptibility to infection (host factors) due to dystemperament or humoral imbalance. Supporters of the Unani view observe that in an epidemic (even of catastrophic proportions) not everyone gets infected despite the ubiquity of the infectious agent, just as most people with streptococcus in their respiratory tract do not develop strep throat infection.

In biology and medicine, there were several noteworthy contributions by Arabs. Al-Razi wrote the first book on smallpox, called, ‘Al-Judri wa al-Hasba’. Ibn-e-Sina’s Canon of Medicine was used as a standard medical text in even as late as the 17th century in Europe. Al-Zahravi was one of the pioneer surgeons and he developed various surgical instruments and methods, which were state of the art at that time and some are still used today. He is also reported to have performed the first cesarean operation. Ibn al- Nafis described the pulmonary circulation of the blood quite a few centuries before William Harvey.

According to the Persian seer Avicenna, whose 'Canon of Medicine' Marjan often consulted, fenugreek is the first stop to curing winter chills. Combined with the hearty kidney beans and succulent meat of the herb stew, it made for an excellent 'garm', or hot, meal.

Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.” He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (whose works were rehabilitated when he was canonized in 1323). Finally, the student would write up his own series of quaestiones, or logical debating points, that seemed to arise from the text, and which were themselves reflections on past scholars’ debates on Aristotle.

A person who is to receive the Most Holy Eucharist is to abstain for at least one hour before Holy Communion from any food and drink, except for only water and medicine [CIC 919 §1]. As this canon reveals, the eucharistic fast is currently reckoned from the time of Communion, not the time that Mass begins. One may take food within one hour of Mass, so long as one does not take it within one hour

Our new understanding of Avicenna’s humors, as presented in this book, reveals that the humors can now be seen as the biochemical classes known today as proteins, lipids, and organic acids. And humors are the macromolecules of the food we eat after they have been absorbed from the stomach and the intestines and gone into the bloodstream.

It should be obvious to us now that, wherever these medical systems may have fallen short on detail, they compensated by elaborating comprehensive, coherent, and useful general concepts that remain a source of strength and a reason for their survival. Not only have their concepts stood the test of time, but modern medical science also now lends support and validation to many of them.

So in a modern interpretation, the humors are not the blood components, as some have interpreted, but rather the chemical classes derived from food such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, organic acids, and their intermediates, which replenish the body with nutrients carried in the blood. Abnormal humors result from the incomplete breakdown of these classes of molecules in the bloodstream, or their aggregation (polymerization) and precipitation.

In WMS, the temperaments are considered obsolete and therefore are rarely invoked as the causal agents of a disease. The humors have been replaced by precise molecules such as cholesterol, hemoglobin, and dozens of other measures that appear today on any routine blood work. So, the general health or sickness profile of the Unani concept, based on either dystemperament or humoral imbalance, or both, has been replaced by a series of single, isolated indicators as the basis for diagnosis and treatment. It is exactly here that the modern physicians fail to connect the details supplied to them by the remarkable achievements of modern science. And here the medicine of Avicenna offers a rationalization that is currently missing in modern medicine.

We have seen physicians who take the route of using recent technology to translate technical data into the Unani medical paradigm for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. These are by far the superior physicians.

Whether one agrees with all, some, or none of Avicenna’s tenets, there is no doubt that his disease concept in Unani is a sound one. It is truly amazing that an eleventh-century physician could have had this incredible power of observation, understanding of biological nature, and ability to synthesize and communicate his science. This truth logically makes one wonder whether we really need to expend all the trouble, time, and expense on the latest state-of-the-art technologies to effectively diagnose a disease!