A Novel Approach to Reference to Medical Narrations

The Infallible Imams (p.b.u.t) paid great attention to concepts such as health, sickness, and treatment with a realistic approach to human. The Islamic medicine narrations attributed to them have been subject to discussion and challenge for long. With the recent tendency of scientists in various fields of medical sciences towards traditional and Islamic medicine, at times they go to extremes concerning acceptability of Islamic medicine by experimental sciences, specifically medicine. Some believe that we should treat these kinds of traditions, as with jurisprudential ones, as divine statements that were made by the Infallibles whose knowledge was divinely granted, which cannot be erroneous. However, by having a deeper look, there appear to be serious challenges in the case of medical narrations and noting these problems prevents us from error in thought. The article at hand deals with some of the problems related to these narrations and how to solve them. This study with reference to original documents of religious narrations and other related sources tried to introduce the serious problems of these medical traditions and studied the problems that go back to the citation, whole concepts, addressee, and meanings of the terms. This study aimed to prove that medical traditions are like other Islamic narrations and infallible statements. They should be studied and evaluated in a specialistic way, with avoidance of prejudgments. To use a narration as a reason, one needs to be familiar with about fifteen fields of basic Islamic sciences, to reference to a medical narration. This reference would be useful only as evidence if it has all the necessary conditions.