Dr. Hakim Chishti is a traditional Unani physician and author of the classic book on Unani Herbal Healing, the Traditional Healers Handbook. (Inner Traditions). Credited with introducing Unani Medicine in the West 25 years ago, Hakim Chishti serves as Director of the American Institute of Unani Herbal healing. Dr. Chishti recently sat for this interview at the Unani Institute, and shared his thoughts about natural healing and the Western medical tradition.

DR. CHISHTI: Well, I don't know that it's been oppressed or opposed as much as it's been abandoned by a series of psychological and sociological phenomena. The first psychological phenomenon was the invention or discovery of penicillin, which was a rather sensational and phenomenal drug which actually overnight eliminated several conditions that previously caused death in people. I'm talking about systemic bacterial infections. So when this was found, you no longer suffered the usual possibility of death from these kind of infections, which previously were great killers in the United States. You had people expecting, and encouraged by research, that there was some kind of magical principle behind all illness --and that there would be a one-shot cure. This turns out to be not true.

The other factor happening was that families in general began to disintegrate, so where you had perhaps, a grandmother, an aunt, or an uncle to provide homecare, to provide the home assistance and support in illnesses that go along with natural therapeutics, the family broke up. Children moved away from home and parents were put into old folks’ homes, along with the very concerted effort of the some medical associations and the pharmaceutical industry to encourage people to use drugs. I think it just happened along these lines.

DR. CHISHTI: We will probably have to see some very fundamental changes in dietary patterns and lifestyles before true natural therapeutics can be the basis of medical treatment in this society. If it ever is to become the primary mode of treatment, it will take another fifty to eighty years. There is a whole complex of psychological underpinnings in the mind of most every person, who "believe" in the whole Western system of doctors, hospitals, and drugs. It is changing to some slight extent, but most people, even those who use "alternative" treatments, if they are truly ill, in severe pain, they head straight to an MD. Very few alternative type healers can treat serious diseases. Most of them do not have enough depth of understanding and training in any system to effectively treat true disease conditions.

DR. CHISHTI: Many people are using herbs, but I don't know whether they're using them in an intelligent way. They don't use them, or apply them, according to any system of rationalized medicine that I'm aware of. They'll take one herb and say, ‘King Henry III used it for gout,’ and it was ‘also used for increasing the menstrual flow in Indian women’, and also ‘the Russians used it in folklore to apply to pig's feet to cause them to keep from freezing in the winter.’ This is the "Hodge Podge School of Herbalism."

There are three Great Traditions of healing—Unani Traditional Medicine, Chinese Traditional Medicine, and Ayurvedic Traditional Medicine. I believe if one wants to use so-called natural remedies in an appropriate way, one should use a proven treatment from one of those systems.

What I'm interested to see occur is more knowledge of and investigation of these herbal traditions that have existed for 2,500 years or more, and are still viable in over half the world. I don't think that we can just ignore them. Today we want to just trade one herb for a chemical drug. And that's what I see people tending to do. They say, "Well, you have arthritis, and let's see, what herb should we use instead of cortisone?" That is an incorrect way to use herbs.

DR. CHISHTI: That presents problems, in my view. For all practical purposes, the infant herbal industry in America has already been entirely coopted by the drug industry. You have the Bayer drug company, for example, now producing "herbal remedies." All kinds of new organizations have sprung up to "prove" that herbs work according to scientific principles. It is likely that as more and more "standards" are established for herbal products and supplements, that it will be totally taken over by the pharmaceutical industry, who will be the only ones capable of complying with the manufacturing standards. It should not be forgotten that herbs have been the primary mode of treatment for human beings for thousands of years. And, they didn’t have scientific methodology, or huge chemical plants to use them effectively.

Besides, all of the traditional systems of medicine use a different framework of analysis. They evaluate the innate metabolic force of the body to determine treatment. Bacteria do exist, but the great traditional systems of healing are more aimed at improving or enhancing the innate healing forces within the body. Western medicine, and now Western herbalism, use disease symptomology as their start and end point. They want to just substitute an herb for a drug to treat a disease. I don’t see any advantage in using such an approach.

DR. CHISHTI: Traditional herbalists do use exact methods to determine the action of herbs---just not the same ones that are used in Western medicine. A traditional physician in India, or some rural village in Afghanistan, for example, will personally inspect and evaluate the herbs they use for treatment. They use their own sight, smell, taste and touch, plus interviews with the growers, among other things, to ascertain the potency and expect action of the herbal substance. This is another kind of "testing" or "knowing," but no less effective. It is often more precise.

DR. CHISHTI: Frankly, I find it ridiculous. It is preposterous that one would spend $15.95 for a bottle of "garlic pills." You can grow a years’ supply of garlic for a family of five in a few weeks. It really doesn’t have to cost anything at all. This all just plays into the mindset of "pill takers."

I believe that most diseases originate in faulty nutrition; that the best cure of disease is in correcting the diet. So, before we get involved in using either chemical drug or herbs or anything else to accelerate or decelerate functions of the body, we should attempt to do it by judicious diet along the nutritional line. People do not a good understanding of how to eat correctly, or what to eat. There are just so many contradictory notions about what micronutrient causes or prevents what disease. Nobody can make sense of it at all.

Look, it is not necessary to spend $150 a month for pills that provide the "correct" nutrition. Humans have lived their lives for tens of thousands of years, without food pills, and without medicating themselves before and after every meal.

"Food is your best medicine." Avicenna said it; Hippocrates said it; Galen said it; and it is utterly and absolutely true. The only people who doubt this, or believe it is false, are those who have no understanding of human food and sustenance, or those who have a vested interest in profiting from people buying their unnecessary products.

DR. CHISHTI: Health is a really combination of factors, besides just not suffering immediate symptoms. True health also involves one’s peace of mind, happy and harmonious relations with relations, having friends, and satisfying work that makes a meaningful contribution to the world.

I would like to see families come back together. I would like to see people more considerate of one another, and a return to some of these so-called "old fashioned" verities that I think are the basis of rational human life on this earth. We're going to have to pay a little more attention to those, if we expect have a life of harmony, satisfaction and health. Today half of all families have no father. A third of all children are born into desperate circumstances of only one parent. There is an old saying in the East: "The family is the fabric that holds a society together. Once that fabric of the family has been torn, no society can be stable or lasting."

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