Okay I know its been only two days since I started this book club thing, but I really wanted to share this with you.  I’ve started reading a book by Hakim Chishti entitled The Traditional Healer’s Handbook: A Classic Guide to the Medicine of Avicenna.  This book specifically describes a type of medical healing tradition called Unani Tibb, which is just Persian for Greek medicine.  I’ve always been interested in traditional healing and the medical practice of the ancients, and I’m excited to finally come across a book which explains traditional medicine from a modern point of view. Although I haven’t finished reading it yet, I think this is the book for anyone who wants an introduction into the world of medieval or traditional medicine.  Now I understand what all this black bile, yellow bile stuff means, where it comes from, and how to apply it to my own understanding of health.

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/images/GalenHippocratesAvicenna.jpg

Human health, especially nutrition, is really complex, and I think its wrong for anyone to disregard the centuries (maybe even millennia) old medical knowledge in favor of an incomplete biomedical science.  I believe its best to take an integrative approach, complementing and affirming what our ancestors already knew with new scientific discoveries.  Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:

“A medical pathologist, in searching for the cause of a disease, will often try to find which enzymes are functioning improperly.  The pathologist can identify about twenty-eight enzymes present in the liver cell, although these same enzymes sometimes travel to far points in the body and are involved in complex processes not directly related to liver function or stomach digestion of foods. This approach might have validity if there were only twenty-eight enzymes in the cells, but there are not.  In fact, a pathologist knows that more than one thousand individual enzymes have been “identified” in each liver cell, yet only about twenty-eight of these are understood definately in terms of their functions.  What the other enzymes do is not known at all.

“If the one thousand enzymes were the outer limit, there might be hope.  But no one knows if there are one thousand enzymes in each liver cell: there may be many thousands, or millions, or billions, or an uncountable number.  The fact is, no one knows.  Not at all.

“Even if we assume that the one thousand enzymes are the limit, this means that with knowledge and consideration of only twenty-eight of them, Western medicine makes decisions based upon somewhat less than 3 percent of the total number of affecting enzymatic agents in just the liver! Of course, there are thousands more biochemical components that also affect sex, digestion, thinking, breathing, and every other human activity.  The number of biochemical interactions are virtually limitless, and new discoveries are being announced almost daily – leading to the discarding of prior theories and treatments.  In fact, not even one medicine that is in today’s pharmacy was on the shelf as short a time as ten years ago.” (page 42)

Interesting stuff, eh?

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