What Is Unani Medicine?
Unani medicine, also called Yunani medicine or Unani-Tibb, is a system of alternative medicine first developed by Islamic physician Avicenna in about 1025 CE. The basic tenets of this system revolve around the overarching principle of balance. Health is seen as the constantly active condition of one’s body rebalancing the four primary elements, which are air, fire, earth, and water. These four elements take on symbolic and literal functions in this system. The methods used to achieve balance and redistribution are often intended to act not directly on the elements, but on more physical manifestations of those elements, such as literal and physical fluids. A practitioner of Unani medicine has a number of diagnostic tools with which to identify a state of disease, including pulse evaluation, examination of bodily waste, and verbal confirmation of pain. Disease is the result of a state of imbalance, and once the imbalance has been identified, it can be corrected. Treatment usually consist
