Medicina Tradicional y Naturopatía Clínica

Abstracto

Evidence-Base Unani Medicine: Need of Appropriate Research Methods

Malik Itrat and Saba Khan

Every health care system must be evidence based and Unani system of medicine ought to be no exception. An evidence base is needed at every level of health-care, right from diagnostics to the therapeutic decision making. Unani medicine requires thorough work to bring out evidence basis not only to support its interventions but also to its fundamental concepts to create scientific and logical basis on which therapeutic decisions are made. However, when pleading for evidence, problems associated with the nature of evidence and their relevance to Unani system of medicine ought to be thoroughly debated. Though Unani system and biomedicine share the same spirit of open and sincere scientific enquiry, their fundamentals, epistemology, logic and theories are distinct. Unani medicine is basically holistic, whereas biomedicine is reductionist. These epistemic variations call for the use of appropriate and acceptable research methods by involving experts from Unani system and biomedicine. The classical approach of this system should not be compromised for the convenience of prevailing research strategies. Various research strategies like reverse pharmacology to unravel the mechanism of action of drugs, pharmaco-epidemiology to study the toxicity of herbo-mineral preparations, retrospective treatment outcome surveys as a starting line to study the efficacy of drugs and whole system research to evaluate the efficacy of packaged interventions have been proposed by scientists to generate evidence in traditional medicine, that are also applicable to Unani system of medicine. In this paper research methods, which are appropriate to generate scientific evidence in Unani medicine are discussed.