Kiarash Aramesh
1,2*1 Director, James F. Drane Bioethics Institute, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Edinboro, PA, USA
2 Associate Professor, Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The recent efforts for revitalizing traditional Iranian medicine (TIM) have shaped two main streams: The quackery traditional
iranian medicine (QTIM) and the academic traditional iranian medicine (ATIM). The QTIM encompasses a wide range of
practitioners with various backgrounds who work outside the academic arena and mostly address the public. These practitioners
have no solid bases or limited boundaries for their claims. Instead, they rely on making misleading references to the Holy Islamic
Scriptures, inducing false hope, claiming miraculous results, appealing to the conspiracy theories, and taking advantage of the
public resentment toward some groups of unprofessional healthcare providers. The theories and practices of ATIM, however, can
be categorized into two major categories: First, valid and scientific TIM that is aimed to conduct well-designed clinical trials and
thereby, supply the evidence-based medicine with new treatments originated in or inspired by TIM. Second, a pseudoscientific
part of the current TIM that is based on some obsolete medical theories, especially the medieval humoral medicine, and erroneous
accounts of human anatomy, physiology, and physiopathology, mostly adopted from the ancient and medieval medical scripts.
TIM has recently established some clinical centers for practicing humoral medicine that is partly pseudoscientific and involves
significant risks. This paper suggests that the public health sector has a duty to act against the promulgation of medical superstitions
by QTIM and the pseudoscientific medical practices of ATIM, and at the same time, support and promote the valid and potentially
beneficial research pursued by ATIM aimed to explore the rich recourses of TIM and thereby enrich the evidence-based medicine.