Comparison of Avicenna’s views with WHO recommendation in labor progress

Document Type : Review Article

Author

Assistant professor, Department of Traditional Medicine, Medical History Studies Institute, Complementary Islamic Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Introduction: Natural vaginal delivery has a physiological process. Despite this process, nowadays in Iran, almost half of the births are through cesarean that this statistic is much higher than global statistics. It seems that the fear caused by inability to control the pain and time of vaginal delivery and the fear of the complications are the common thread between doctor and patient which results in final decision for caesarean section. Complementary medicine beside classic medicine has valuable points which helps to natural labor induction that evaluation of these issues help to better controlling of labor process.
Methods: At first, various versions of Avicenna were evaluated to select the version which is of most originality from the views of the modifiers of manuscripts and lithography. So that, Canon version in medicine published in Beirut as Arabic was selected. In Canon book version 3, uterine diseases were explained and in this section, a separate part has been assigned to delivery. The mentioned part was translated and the views of Avicenna about labor facilitating were considered in this article. Then, using WHO, the recommendations for performing vaginal delivery were compared with those of Avicenna.
Results: World Health Organization and Avicenna have recommended some guidelines in vaginal delivery induction to reduce the complications. These were food recommendations, stress control, how to breathe, how to bath, respectively. Food recommendations, the position of parturient, how to breathe, massage and anoint, and use of deodorant fragrances have been mentioned as detailed in Canon.
Conclusion: With regard to the recommendations of Avicenna about labor and comparing them with those of WHO, it seems that Hakim's views are up to date.

Keywords


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