القانون في الطب Quotes

“برخی از اطبا می گویند: مالیخولیا از جنّیان است.
برای ما در طب فرقی ندارد که از جن باشد یا نه. ما می گوییم: چه از جن باشد یا نباشد، مزاج بیمار سودایی می شود. پس علت قریبه اش وجود سوداست، بگذار علت العلل سودا، جن باشد.”
― Ibn Sina, القانون في الطب

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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?”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“دو عنصر سنگین، یعنی خاک و آب، در پیدایش و ثبات اعضای بدن مؤثرند و دو عنصر سبک، یعنی آتش و هوا، در پیدایش و حرکت روح و حرکت اعضای بدن مؤثرند.”
― Ibn Sina, القانون في الطب

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“Unani physicians practice individualized medicine, an idea that has just started to take hold in modern medicine but is without solid practice yet.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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!”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care

“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.”
― Mones Abu-Asab, Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care