Iranian-Islamic traditional medicine: An ancient comprehensive personalized medicine

Abstract

Personalized medicine (PM) is a novel term used for a medical model in which all diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic aspects of a disease are individualized for a patient using specific molecular testing. In Iranian-Islamic traditional medicine (IITM) an ancient paradigm for PM has been described which has been introduced in this paper. We reviewed the ancient resources of IITM and many valid recent studies on personalized medicine and described an ancient feature of personalized medicine in comparison with new ones. According to IITM scholars, every person has an individual temperament which is concluded of four basic humors combination. The individual temper is influenced by internal and external factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, season, and environment. This variability leads to different physical and mental behaviors toward a particular condition; so if we could identify the patient's temper, we would predict his/her health-related behaviors rather than predisposition and prognosis to different diseases, and select the best treatment. This holistic viewpoint of IITM to the human health and disease justifies the variable phenotypes among similar illnesses; the fact around which more advanced high-tech researches are being developed to explore all specific molecular pathways. IITM offers an ancient comprehensive PM (APM) which is more available and inexpensive compared to the modern PM (MPM). Moreover, APM focuses more on fitness than illness in comparison to MPM. It seems more attention to APM introduced by IITM could help us to promote health community. Design studies using high-tech MPM techniques would likely lead to clarification of most molecular aspects of APM.