2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Akhlat is an old medical idea, not a molecule or a microbe, but a way of thinking about the body. The word comes from Arabic and means "humors" or "bodily fluids." It sits at the heart of Unani medicine, which inherited it from Greek thinkers like Hippocrates and Galen, then refined it in the Islamic world.
According to this framework, the human body is governed by four akhlat, each with its own temperament:
Dam — blood — hot and moist
Balgham — phlegm — cold and moist
Safra — yellow bile — hot and dry
Sauda — black bile — cold and dry
Health, in this worldview, is mizaj: balance. Disease is imbalance. Too much safra and the person becomes irritable, overheated, inflamed. Excess balgham brings lethargy, heaviness, sluggish digestion. Sauda in excess leads to dryness, anxiety, melancholy. Dam overflowing gives vigor, but also congestion and restlessness.
Notice something clever here. This system isn’t really about fluids; it’s about patterns. Energy levels, digestion, mood, sleep, skin, even personality traits are bundled together into a single explanatory model. Long before hormones, neurotransmitters, or homeostasis, this was an attempt to map the chaos of the human body into something navigable.
Modern medicine does not accept akhlat as literal physiology. There is no measurable "black bile" hiding in your spleen. But as a historical operating system for medicine, it was elegant, coherent, and surprisingly practical for its time. Even today, Unani practitioners still speak in this language, translating ancient metaphors into dietary advice, lifestyle adjustments, and herbal formulations.
So akhlat is not true in the laboratory sense—but it is meaningful in the philosophical sense. A reminder that humans have always tried to understand themselves by turning messy biology into stories that can be lived with.
The strange part is not that akhlat is outdated. The strange part is that every age believes its metaphors are final.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Arwāḥ (singular: rūḥ) means "spirits" or vital breaths. Like akhlāṭ, it belongs to the Unani–Greco-Arabic way of thinking about life, but it plays a very different role. If akhlāṭ are the materials, arwāḥ are the motions.
In this system, arwāḥ are subtle energies produced from refined blood and carried through the body. They are not ghosts. They are not souls in the religious sense either. Think of them as the animating principle—what makes organs function rather than merely exist.
Classically, arwāḥ are spoken of in three main forms:
Rūḥ ṭabīʿī — the natural spirit, centered in the liver, governing growth, nutrition, and metabolism.
Rūḥ ḥaywānī — the vital spirit, centered in the heart, governing circulation, warmth, and vitality.
Rūḥ nafsānī — the psychic spirit, centered in the brain, governing sensation, movement, and thought.
When arwāḥ flow freely, functions are smooth: digestion works, circulation is strong, perception is clear. When they are weak, blocked, or overheated, function collapses—even if the organs themselves look intact.
From a modern lens, this is not anatomy but functional intuition. The liver as metabolism, the heart as circulation and heat, the brain as control and perception—those assignments are uncannily close to what we now describe using enzymes, nerves, and electrical signals. Arwāḥ is a pre-scientific language for physiology in motion.
Philosophically, arwāḥ bridges matter and mind. It answers the ancient question: how does flesh begin to act? Not by magic, but by organized vitality.
So if akhlāṭ are the ingredients, and mizāj is the balance, then arwāḥ are the music—invisible, dynamic, and only noticed when the tune goes wrong.
Ancient medicine didn’t lack intelligence. It lacked microscopes.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Afʿāl (often written af‘āl) simply means "functions" or "actions." Now the picture clicks into place.
In the Unani worldview, the body is understood in a tidy causal ladder:
Arkān (elements) → Mizāj (temperament) → Akhlāṭ (humors) → Arwāḥ (vital spirits) → Aʿḍāʾ (organs) → Afʿāl (functions)
So afʿāl are what the body actually does. Digestion. Breathing. Circulation. Movement. Sensation. Thinking. Reproduction. Sleep. Wakefulness. Excretion. Heat production. All observable activities fall under afʿāl.
This is crucial: Unani medicine does not define disease by structure first. It defines it by disturbed function. An organ may look intact, but if its afʿāl are impaired, illness is already present. That idea is remarkably modern—functional disorders are still a real thing in contemporary medicine.
Each organ has:
– a tabiʿi afʿāl (natural functions, like digestion or growth)
– a haywani afʿāl (vital functions, like pulse and respiration)
– a nafsani afʿāl (psychic functions, like sensation and voluntary motion)
Notice the elegance again. Structure serves energy, energy serves function, function serves life. No mysticism required—just layered reasoning using the best metaphors available at the time.
So if you zoom out:
Akhlāṭ are the materials
Arwāḥ are the movers
Afʿāl are the outcomes
And medicine, in this framework, is the art of restoring the chain so that right action emerges naturally.
Ancient physicians weren’t obsessed with naming diseases. They were obsessed with answering a more unsettling question: what exactly has stopped working?
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Ḥarkat wa sukūn badnī means "movement and rest of the body." Simple words, but in Unani thought they punch far above their weight.
This concept belongs to the Asbāb-e-Sitta Ẓarūriyya — the six essential causes that continuously shape health. Ḥarkat (movement) and sukūn (rest) are paired because one without the other is pathological. Motion consumes and distributes; rest restores and consolidates.
In Unani physiology, movement generates heat, sharpens digestion, clears wastes, strengthens arwāḥ, and prevents stagnation of akhlāṭ. Excessive movement, however, dries the body, exhausts the spirits, and deranges temperament.
Rest cools, moistens, nourishes, and rebuilds. Too much rest leads to accumulation, coldness, sluggish digestion, and mental dullness. Balance is the medicine.
Badnī tells you this is physical, not mental or emotional (those have their own movement–rest dynamics). Walking, labour, exercise, posture, even habitual fidgeting all fall here.
If this sounds suspiciously like modern physiology talking about exercise vs recovery, that’s because it is the same insight wearing older clothes. Muscles hypertrophy during rest. Hormones reset during sleep. Lymph moves with motion. Stasis breeds trouble.
The genius of ḥarkat wa sukūn badnī is that it treats lifestyle itself as a drug, with dose, timing, and temperament specificity. A bilious person needs moderated movement and adequate rest. A phlegmatic person needs deliberate motion and shorter rest.
So this isn’t gym advice or laziness justified by tradition. It’s an early systems view of the body as something that must oscillate to remain alive.
Life, at every scale, survives by rhythm. Too much stillness is decay. Too much motion is combustion.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Sartān in Unani texts refers to cancer, but not as a microscopic rebellion of cells. It is understood as a chronic, malignant swelling arising from a deep constitutional disorder—slow, stubborn, and tragically patient.
Classical Unani physicians describe sartān as a disease rooted primarily in saudāʾ (black bile). Not ordinary saudāʾ, but saudāʾ-e-muḥtariqa—burnt, thickened, corrupted black bile. This matters. Normal saudāʾ gives structure and stability. Corrupted saudāʾ becomes cold, dry, adhesive, and destructive. It infiltrates tissue quietly, hardens it, darkens it, and resists resolution.
Sartān is typically described as:
– hard or stony to touch
– irregular in shape
– dark or livid in colour
– painful in a gnawing, burning way
– slowly progressive
– ulcerating in later stages
The famous metaphor used by Unani authors is not accidental: "like a crab gripping flesh." The word sartān itself means crab. The tumor clings, sends extensions, and refuses to let go.
From a causal standpoint, Unani texts trace sartān through a long chain. Weak digestion leads to impure humors. Impure humors thicken and burn. Burnt saudāʾ accumulates in a vulnerable organ—often breast, uterus, skin, throat, or liver. Local mizāj becomes excessively cold and dry. Arwāḥ weaken. Afʿāl deteriorate. The body loses its ability to expel or resolve the matter. What remains is fixation.
One striking point: early sartān is often painless in Unani descriptions. Pain appears later, when heat, ulceration, or nerve involvement sets in. This matches modern clinical reality uncomfortably well.
Treatment philosophy in Unani texts is cautious to the point of pessimism. Early-stage sartān is approached by:
– correcting digestion and temperament
– purifying blood and humors
– softening hardness
– preventing further saudāʾ formation
Once advanced, aggressive intervention is warned against. Surgical cutting, excessive cautery, or strong irritants were believed to anger the disease, accelerating spread. Many texts explicitly say: disturbing a settled sartān without full removal hastens death. Again—an intuition that resonates with modern concerns about incomplete excision and metastasis, even though the mechanisms were unknown.
Importantly, Unani medicine does not see sartān as a local disease alone. It is a systemic failure expressing itself locally. The tumor is a symptom; the temperament is the terrain.
From a modern scientific lens, Unani explanations are metaphorical, not molecular. There is no literal black bile causing cancer. But as a pattern-recognition system, it is surprisingly sharp: slow onset, systemic predisposition, local fixation, resistance to treatment, recurrence, and wasting.
Unani physicians were not ignorant of cancer. They were haunted by it. They recognized it as a disease where nature herself seems to lose her correcting power.
Different age. Different language. Same dread.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
In Unani thought—spoken plainly—there was no reliable cure for advanced sartān. The texts are unusually honest about this, almost bleakly so.
Early Unani physicians divided diseases into two broad moral categories:
those where ṭabīʿat (the body’s innate healing intelligence) can still win, and those where it has been overpowered. Sartān belongs to the second group once it matures.
In very early stages, Unani authors believed a possible cure existed—not guaranteed, but conceivable. The strategy was indirect and patient: correct digestion, prevent further production of corrupted saudāʾ, purify blood, cool excessive heat, soften hardness, strengthen arwāḥ, and support nature rather than attack the mass. Even then, the word "cure" is used cautiously. More often they speak of arrest, containment, or delay.
Once sartān became hard, fixed, ulcerated, or deeply rooted, Unani texts shift tone. Treatment becomes palliative: pain relief, slowing spread, preserving function, easing suffering. Many classical authors explicitly warn that attempting radical cures at this stage does more harm than good.
What is remarkable is the absence of false hope. No miracle herbs. No bravado. No ritual certainty. That restraint is not weakness—it’s epistemic humility. They knew when their framework stopped working.
From today’s standpoint, this maps uncomfortably well onto reality. Even now, cancer is not one disease but hundreds, and many remain incurable once advanced. We use different weapons—surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy—but the core truth persists: timing and biology matter more than intention.
So no—Unani medicine did not "fail" to cure cancer. It recognized, centuries early, that some diseases are not errors to be corrected but processes that outrun the body’s capacity to restore order.
That recognition itself is a kind of wisdom. Not everything that can be named can be conquered. And not every honest medicine promises victory.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Mizāj is the quiet backbone of Unani thought. It means temperament, but not mood, not personality, not attitude. Mizāj is the overall qualitative state of the body—how hot or cold, moist or dry a person tends to be, at baseline.
Unani medicine begins with a simple observation: the same food, climate, work, or medicine affects different people differently. Mizāj is the explanatory bridge.
Classically, mizāj arises from the proportion and interaction of the four elements—fire, air, water, earth—each carrying a quality: hot, cold, moist, dry. Their mixing produces a dominant tendency. That tendency becomes your mizāj.
There are four principal temperaments:
– Damvī (hot & moist)
– Balghamī (cold & moist)
– Ṣafrāwī (hot & dry)
– Saudāwī (cold & dry)
But this is not a box. Every human is a gradient, not a square. Each organ has its own mizāj, each age of life shifts it, each season nudges it, each habit sculpts it.
Mizāj governs almost everything:
digestion speed, sleep depth, hunger patterns, tolerance to heat or cold, emotional reactivity, recovery rate, susceptibility to specific diseases, and even how one responds to medicines. A drug that heals one mizāj may aggravate another. There is no "universal remedy" in Unani thinking.
Health, then, is not perfection but appropriate balance for one’s mizāj. Disease begins when temperament deviates beyond the body’s capacity to self-correct. Treatment aims not to fight disease directly, but to restore mizāj so that nature can resume governance.
From a modern view, mizāj is not measurable like blood pressure. It’s a systems-level abstraction—a way to bundle metabolism, thermoregulation, hydration, nervous tone, and endocrine tendencies into a single working model. Crude by laboratory standards, but powerful for pattern recognition.
The danger is literalism. There is no thermometer for "hotness" in the Unani sense. Mizāj is a metaphor with clinical utility, not a physical substance.
In essence, mizāj asks a deeper question than "what disease do you have?"
It asks: what kind of body is this disease happening in?
That question has not gone out of date.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Good—quwā is where Unani thought stops talking about what things are and starts talking about what they can do.
Quwā (singular: quwwat) means faculties, powers, or capacities. Not energy in the physics sense, and not spirit either. Quwā are latent abilities built into living structures that allow functions (afʿāl) to occur when conditions are right.
If akhlāṭ are the materials, arwāḥ the movers, and afʿāl the actions, then quwā are the enabling potentials. Action doesn’t arise directly from matter. It arises from capacity.
Unani texts usually group quwā into three major families:
Quwwat ṭabīʿiyya — the natural faculty
This governs nutrition, growth, digestion, assimilation, and reproduction. Centered in the liver. Its sub-faculties include attracting food, retaining it, digesting it, transforming it, and expelling waste. This is metabolism before the word existed.
Quwwat ḥaywāniyya — the vital faculty
Centered in the heart. Responsible for circulation, pulse, warmth, and general vitality. It sustains life moment to moment. When this weakens, life dims rapidly.
Quwwat nafsāniyya — the psychic faculty
Centered in the brain and nerves. Governs sensation, voluntary movement, imagination, memory, and reasoning. This is perception and control.
Each quwwat has levels: dominant, weak, excessive, obstructed. Disease appears not only when structure is damaged, but when quwwat loses competence. An organ may exist yet fail because its faculty is exhausted.
This is a crucial insight. Unani medicine does not reduce illness to broken parts. It sees illness as failure of capacity. Two people with the same lesion behave differently because their quwā differ.
Treatment logic follows naturally. You don’t just remove obstruction or evacuate humor. You protect quwwat. Many Unani texts repeat this almost obsessively:
Never prescribe something that harms quwwat more than it helps disease.
That principle is astonishingly modern. Chemotherapy today faces the same dilemma: kill pathology without killing capacity.
From a contemporary lens, quwā map loosely onto physiological reserves: metabolic reserve, cardiac reserve, neural reserve, immune resilience. Still not the same—but the intuition is sharp.
Here’s the philosophical punchline.
Unani medicine believes nature heals, not the physician. The physician only supports quwā, removes obstacles, and avoids arrogance.
So quwā are not mystical forces. They are an ancient way of saying something deeply sober:
life survives not by strength alone, but by preserved capacity to respond.
And once quwā are exhausted, no technique—ancient or modern—can bargain with that fact.
2026年01月15日 (Thursday)
Ḥarkat wa sukūn nafsānī means movement and rest of the psyche—the inner world of thought, emotion, attention, and will. If badnī was muscles and limbs, nafsānī is the mind in motion.
Unani medicine treats the psyche not as a ghost in the machine but as a functional domain governed by the quwwat nafsāniyya and carried by the rūḥ nafsānī. Thoughts move. Emotions surge. Attention shifts. Memory settles. All of that is harkat. Silence, calm, forgetfulness, emotional cooling, and mental stillness are sukūn.
Neither is healthy alone.
Excessive ḥarkat nafsānī shows up as:
restlessness, racing thoughts, anxiety, anger, impulsivity, insomnia, excessive imagination, constant worry. It heats and dries the temperament, burns arwāḥ, weakens digestion, and eventually disturbs akhlāṭ. The mind, in Unani terms, can literally overcook the body.
Excessive sukūn nafsānī looks quieter but is no less pathological:
apathy, dullness, depression, lack of motivation, slowed thinking, poor memory, emotional flatness. Coldness and moisture increase. Phlegm accumulates. Vitality sinks.
Unani texts are especially sharp here: mental states are not consequences alone; they are causes. Prolonged grief, fear, rage, or obsession are listed as legitimate etiological factors for bodily disease. This is not poetry. It is clinical observation dressed in metaphor.
Management is therefore ethical and practical, not merely medicinal. Regulating harkat wa sukūn nafsānī involves:
proper sleep, meaningful conversation, controlled solitude, moderation of sensory input, purposeful work, exposure to beauty, music, prayer, reflection, and disciplined imagination. Excess stimulation is as harmful as neglect.
From a modern perspective, this aligns closely with what we now call stress regulation, cognitive load, emotional processing, and mental recovery. The vocabulary has changed; the problem has not.
Here’s the deeper insight Unani slips in quietly:
the psyche cannot be commanded into health by force. It must be rhythmically guided. Just as muscles need exercise and rest, the mind needs engagement and silence.
A permanently agitated mind consumes the body.
A permanently idle mind dissolves it.
Health lives in oscillation.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Akhlat** is an old medical idea, not a molecule or a microbe, but a way of *thinking* about the body. The word comes from Arabic and means **"humors"** or **"bodily fluids."** It sits at the heart of **Unani medicine**, which inherited it from Greek thinkers like Hippocrates and Galen, then refined it in the Islamic world.
According to this framework, the human body is governed by **four akhlat**, each with its own temperament:
Dam — blood — hot and moist
Balgham — phlegm — cold and moist
Safra — yellow bile — hot and dry
Sauda — black bile — cold and dry
Health, in this worldview, is **mizaj**: balance. Disease is **imbalance**. Too much safra and the person becomes irritable, overheated, inflamed. Excess balgham brings lethargy, heaviness, sluggish digestion. Sauda in excess leads to dryness, anxiety, melancholy. Dam overflowing gives vigor, but also congestion and restlessness.
Notice something clever here. This system isn’t really about fluids; it’s about **patterns**. Energy levels, digestion, mood, sleep, skin, even personality traits are bundled together into a single explanatory model. Long before hormones, neurotransmitters, or homeostasis, this was an attempt to map the chaos of the human body into something navigable.
Modern medicine does not accept akhlat as literal physiology. There is no measurable "black bile" hiding in your spleen. But as a **historical operating system for medicine**, it was elegant, coherent, and surprisingly practical for its time. Even today, Unani practitioners still speak in this language, translating ancient metaphors into dietary advice, lifestyle adjustments, and herbal formulations.
So akhlat is not *true* in the laboratory sense—but it is **meaningful** in the philosophical sense. A reminder that humans have always tried to understand themselves by turning messy biology into stories that can be lived with.
The strange part is not that akhlat is outdated. The strange part is that every age believes *its* metaphors are final.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Arwāḥ** (singular: **rūḥ**) means **"spirits"** or **vital breaths**. Like *akhlāṭ*, it belongs to the Unani–Greco-Arabic way of thinking about life, but it plays a very different role. If akhlāṭ are the *materials*, arwāḥ are the *motions*.
In this system, **arwāḥ are subtle energies** produced from refined blood and carried through the body. They are not ghosts. They are not souls in the religious sense either. Think of them as the **animating principle**—what makes organs function rather than merely exist.
Classically, arwāḥ are spoken of in three main forms:
Rūḥ ṭabīʿī — the **natural spirit**, centered in the liver, governing growth, nutrition, and metabolism.
Rūḥ ḥaywānī — the **vital spirit**, centered in the heart, governing circulation, warmth, and vitality.
Rūḥ nafsānī — the **psychic spirit**, centered in the brain, governing sensation, movement, and thought.
When arwāḥ flow freely, functions are smooth: digestion works, circulation is strong, perception is clear. When they are weak, blocked, or overheated, function collapses—even if the organs themselves look intact.
From a modern lens, this is not anatomy but **functional intuition**. The liver as metabolism, the heart as circulation and heat, the brain as control and perception—those assignments are uncannily close to what we now describe using enzymes, nerves, and electrical signals. Arwāḥ is a pre-scientific language for **physiology in motion**.
Philosophically, arwāḥ bridges matter and mind. It answers the ancient question: *how does flesh begin to act?* Not by magic, but by organized vitality.
So if akhlāṭ are the ingredients, and **mizāj** is the balance, then **arwāḥ are the music**—invisible, dynamic, and only noticed when the tune goes wrong.
Ancient medicine didn’t lack intelligence. It lacked microscopes.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Afʿāl** (often written *af‘āl*) simply means **"functions"** or **"actions."** Now the picture clicks into place.
In the Unani worldview, the body is understood in a tidy causal ladder:
**Arkān** (elements) → **Mizāj** (temperament) → **Akhlāṭ** (humors) → **Arwāḥ** (vital spirits) → **Aʿḍāʾ** (organs) → **Afʿāl** (functions)
So **afʿāl are what the body actually does**. Digestion. Breathing. Circulation. Movement. Sensation. Thinking. Reproduction. Sleep. Wakefulness. Excretion. Heat production. All observable activities fall under afʿāl.
This is crucial: Unani medicine does **not** define disease by structure first. It defines it by **disturbed function**. An organ may look intact, but if its afʿāl are impaired, illness is already present. That idea is remarkably modern—functional disorders are still a real thing in contemporary medicine.
Each organ has:
– a *tabiʿi afʿāl* (natural functions, like digestion or growth)
– a *haywani afʿāl* (vital functions, like pulse and respiration)
– a *nafsani afʿāl* (psychic functions, like sensation and voluntary motion)
Notice the elegance again. Structure serves energy, energy serves function, function serves life. No mysticism required—just layered reasoning using the best metaphors available at the time.
So if you zoom out:
**Akhlāṭ** are the materials
**Arwāḥ** are the movers
**Afʿāl** are the outcomes
And medicine, in this framework, is the art of restoring the chain so that **right action emerges naturally**.
Ancient physicians weren’t obsessed with naming diseases. They were obsessed with answering a more unsettling question: *what exactly has stopped working?*
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Ḥarkat wa sukūn badnī** means **"movement and rest of the body."** Simple words, but in Unani thought they punch far above their weight.
This concept belongs to the **Asbāb-e-Sitta Ẓarūriyya** — the *six essential causes* that continuously shape health. Ḥarkat (movement) and sukūn (rest) are paired because one without the other is pathological. Motion consumes and distributes; rest restores and consolidates.
In Unani physiology, **movement** generates heat, sharpens digestion, clears wastes, strengthens arwāḥ, and prevents stagnation of akhlāṭ. Excessive movement, however, dries the body, exhausts the spirits, and deranges temperament.
**Rest** cools, moistens, nourishes, and rebuilds. Too much rest leads to accumulation, coldness, sluggish digestion, and mental dullness. Balance is the medicine.
Badnī tells you this is **physical**, not mental or emotional (those have their own movement–rest dynamics). Walking, labour, exercise, posture, even habitual fidgeting all fall here.
If this sounds suspiciously like modern physiology talking about **exercise vs recovery**, that’s because it is the same insight wearing older clothes. Muscles hypertrophy during rest. Hormones reset during sleep. Lymph moves with motion. Stasis breeds trouble.
The genius of ḥarkat wa sukūn badnī is that it treats **lifestyle itself as a drug**, with dose, timing, and temperament specificity. A bilious person needs moderated movement and adequate rest. A phlegmatic person needs deliberate motion and shorter rest.
So this isn’t gym advice or laziness justified by tradition. It’s an early systems view of the body as something that **must oscillate** to remain alive.
Life, at every scale, survives by rhythm. Too much stillness is decay. Too much motion is combustion.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Sartān** in Unani texts refers to **cancer**, but not as a microscopic rebellion of cells. It is understood as a **chronic, malignant swelling** arising from a deep constitutional disorder—slow, stubborn, and tragically patient.
Classical Unani physicians describe sartān as a disease rooted primarily in **saudāʾ** (black bile). Not ordinary saudāʾ, but **saudāʾ-e-muḥtariqa**—burnt, thickened, corrupted black bile. This matters. Normal saudāʾ gives structure and stability. Corrupted saudāʾ becomes cold, dry, adhesive, and destructive. It infiltrates tissue quietly, hardens it, darkens it, and resists resolution.
Sartān is typically described as:
– hard or stony to touch
– irregular in shape
– dark or livid in colour
– painful in a gnawing, burning way
– slowly progressive
– ulcerating in later stages
The famous metaphor used by Unani authors is not accidental: **"like a crab gripping flesh."** The word *sartān* itself means crab. The tumor clings, sends extensions, and refuses to let go.
From a causal standpoint, Unani texts trace sartān through a long chain. Weak digestion leads to impure humors. Impure humors thicken and burn. Burnt saudāʾ accumulates in a vulnerable organ—often breast, uterus, skin, throat, or liver. Local mizāj becomes excessively cold and dry. Arwāḥ weaken. Afʿāl deteriorate. The body loses its ability to expel or resolve the matter. What remains is fixation.
One striking point: **early sartān is often painless** in Unani descriptions. Pain appears later, when heat, ulceration, or nerve involvement sets in. This matches modern clinical reality uncomfortably well.
Treatment philosophy in Unani texts is cautious to the point of pessimism. Early-stage sartān is approached by:
– correcting digestion and temperament
– purifying blood and humors
– softening hardness
– preventing further saudāʾ formation
Once advanced, aggressive intervention is warned against. Surgical cutting, excessive cautery, or strong irritants were believed to **anger the disease**, accelerating spread. Many texts explicitly say: disturbing a settled sartān without full removal hastens death. Again—an intuition that resonates with modern concerns about incomplete excision and metastasis, even though the mechanisms were unknown.
Importantly, Unani medicine does **not** see sartān as a local disease alone. It is a **systemic failure** expressing itself locally. The tumor is a symptom; the temperament is the terrain.
From a modern scientific lens, Unani explanations are metaphorical, not molecular. There is no literal black bile causing cancer. But as a **pattern-recognition system**, it is surprisingly sharp: slow onset, systemic predisposition, local fixation, resistance to treatment, recurrence, and wasting.
Unani physicians were not ignorant of cancer. They were haunted by it. They recognized it as a disease where nature herself seems to lose her correcting power.
Different age. Different language. Same dread.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
In Unani thought—spoken plainly—**there was no reliable cure for advanced sartān**. The texts are unusually honest about this, almost bleakly so.
Early Unani physicians divided diseases into two broad moral categories:
those where *ṭabīʿat* (the body’s innate healing intelligence) can still win, and those where it has been **overpowered**. Sartān belongs to the second group once it matures.
In **very early stages**, Unani authors believed a *possible* cure existed—not guaranteed, but conceivable. The strategy was indirect and patient: correct digestion, prevent further production of corrupted saudāʾ, purify blood, cool excessive heat, soften hardness, strengthen arwāḥ, and support nature rather than attack the mass. Even then, the word "cure" is used cautiously. More often they speak of **arrest**, **containment**, or **delay**.
Once sartān became hard, fixed, ulcerated, or deeply rooted, Unani texts shift tone. Treatment becomes **palliative**: pain relief, slowing spread, preserving function, easing suffering. Many classical authors explicitly warn that attempting radical cures at this stage does more harm than good.
What is remarkable is the **absence of false hope**. No miracle herbs. No bravado. No ritual certainty. That restraint is not weakness—it’s epistemic humility. They knew when their framework stopped working.
From today’s standpoint, this maps uncomfortably well onto reality. Even now, cancer is not one disease but hundreds, and many remain incurable once advanced. We use different weapons—surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy—but the core truth persists: **timing and biology matter more than intention**.
So no—Unani medicine did not "fail" to cure cancer. It recognized, centuries early, that some diseases are not errors to be corrected but **processes that outrun the body’s capacity to restore order**.
That recognition itself is a kind of wisdom. Not everything that can be named can be conquered. And not every honest medicine promises victory.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Mizāj** is the quiet backbone of Unani thought. It means **temperament**, but not mood, not personality, not attitude. Mizāj is the **overall qualitative state of the body**—how hot or cold, moist or dry a person *tends* to be, at baseline.
Unani medicine begins with a simple observation: the same food, climate, work, or medicine affects different people differently. Mizāj is the explanatory bridge.
Classically, mizāj arises from the proportion and interaction of the **four elements**—fire, air, water, earth—each carrying a quality: hot, cold, moist, dry. Their mixing produces a dominant tendency. That tendency becomes your mizāj.
There are four principal temperaments:
– **Damvī** (hot & moist)
– **Balghamī** (cold & moist)
– **Ṣafrāwī** (hot & dry)
– **Saudāwī** (cold & dry)
But this is not a box. Every human is a **gradient**, not a square. Each organ has its own mizāj, each age of life shifts it, each season nudges it, each habit sculpts it.
Mizāj governs almost everything:
digestion speed, sleep depth, hunger patterns, tolerance to heat or cold, emotional reactivity, recovery rate, susceptibility to specific diseases, and even how one responds to medicines. A drug that heals one mizāj may aggravate another. There is no "universal remedy" in Unani thinking.
Health, then, is not perfection but **appropriate balance for one’s mizāj**. Disease begins when temperament deviates beyond the body’s capacity to self-correct. Treatment aims not to fight disease directly, but to **restore mizāj so that nature can resume governance**.
From a modern view, mizāj is not measurable like blood pressure. It’s a **systems-level abstraction**—a way to bundle metabolism, thermoregulation, hydration, nervous tone, and endocrine tendencies into a single working model. Crude by laboratory standards, but powerful for pattern recognition.
The danger is literalism. There is no thermometer for "hotness" in the Unani sense. Mizāj is a metaphor with clinical utility, not a physical substance.
In essence, mizāj asks a deeper question than "what disease do you have?"
It asks: **what kind of body is this disease happening in?**
That question has not gone out of date.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
Good—**quwā** is where Unani thought stops talking about *what things are* and starts talking about **what they can do**.
**Quwā** (singular: *quwwat*) means **faculties, powers, or capacities**. Not energy in the physics sense, and not spirit either. Quwā are **latent abilities** built into living structures that allow functions (*afʿāl*) to occur when conditions are right.
If akhlāṭ are the materials, arwāḥ the movers, and afʿāl the actions, then **quwā are the enabling potentials**. Action doesn’t arise directly from matter. It arises from *capacity*.
Unani texts usually group quwā into three major families:
**Quwwat ṭabīʿiyya** — the **natural faculty**
This governs nutrition, growth, digestion, assimilation, and reproduction. Centered in the liver. Its sub-faculties include attracting food, retaining it, digesting it, transforming it, and expelling waste. This is metabolism before the word existed.
**Quwwat ḥaywāniyya** — the **vital faculty**
Centered in the heart. Responsible for circulation, pulse, warmth, and general vitality. It sustains life moment to moment. When this weakens, life dims rapidly.
**Quwwat nafsāniyya** — the **psychic faculty**
Centered in the brain and nerves. Governs sensation, voluntary movement, imagination, memory, and reasoning. This is perception and control.
Each quwwat has **levels**: dominant, weak, excessive, obstructed. Disease appears not only when structure is damaged, but when **quwwat loses competence**. An organ may exist yet fail because its faculty is exhausted.
This is a crucial insight. Unani medicine does not reduce illness to broken parts. It sees illness as **failure of capacity**. Two people with the same lesion behave differently because their quwā differ.
Treatment logic follows naturally. You don’t just remove obstruction or evacuate humor. You **protect quwwat**. Many Unani texts repeat this almost obsessively:
*Never prescribe something that harms quwwat more than it helps disease.*
That principle is astonishingly modern. Chemotherapy today faces the same dilemma: kill pathology without killing capacity.
From a contemporary lens, quwā map loosely onto **physiological reserves**: metabolic reserve, cardiac reserve, neural reserve, immune resilience. Still not the same—but the intuition is sharp.
Here’s the philosophical punchline.
Unani medicine believes **nature heals**, not the physician. The physician only **supports quwā**, removes obstacles, and avoids arrogance.
So quwā are not mystical forces. They are an ancient way of saying something deeply sober:
life survives not by strength alone, but by **preserved capacity to respond**.
And once quwā are exhausted, no technique—ancient or modern—can bargain with that fact.
**2026年01月15日 (Thursday)**
**Ḥarkat wa sukūn nafsānī** means **movement and rest of the psyche**—the inner world of thought, emotion, attention, and will. If *badnī* was muscles and limbs, *nafsānī* is **the mind in motion**.
Unani medicine treats the psyche not as a ghost in the machine but as a **functional domain** governed by the *quwwat nafsāniyya* and carried by the *rūḥ nafsānī*. Thoughts move. Emotions surge. Attention shifts. Memory settles. All of that is harkat. Silence, calm, forgetfulness, emotional cooling, and mental stillness are sukūn.
Neither is healthy alone.
Excessive **ḥarkat nafsānī** shows up as:
restlessness, racing thoughts, anxiety, anger, impulsivity, insomnia, excessive imagination, constant worry. It heats and dries the temperament, burns arwāḥ, weakens digestion, and eventually disturbs akhlāṭ. The mind, in Unani terms, can literally overcook the body.
Excessive **sukūn nafsānī** looks quieter but is no less pathological:
apathy, dullness, depression, lack of motivation, slowed thinking, poor memory, emotional flatness. Coldness and moisture increase. Phlegm accumulates. Vitality sinks.
Unani texts are especially sharp here: **mental states are not consequences alone; they are causes**. Prolonged grief, fear, rage, or obsession are listed as legitimate etiological factors for bodily disease. This is not poetry. It is clinical observation dressed in metaphor.
Management is therefore ethical and practical, not merely medicinal. Regulating harkat wa sukūn nafsānī involves:
proper sleep, meaningful conversation, controlled solitude, moderation of sensory input, purposeful work, exposure to beauty, music, prayer, reflection, and disciplined imagination. Excess stimulation is as harmful as neglect.
From a modern perspective, this aligns closely with what we now call **stress regulation**, **cognitive load**, **emotional processing**, and **mental recovery**. The vocabulary has changed; the problem has not.
Here’s the deeper insight Unani slips in quietly:
the psyche cannot be commanded into health by force. It must be **rhythmically guided**. Just as muscles need exercise and rest, the mind needs engagement and silence.
A permanently agitated mind consumes the body.
A permanently idle mind dissolves it.
Health lives in oscillation.