Introduction to the Concept of Crisis in Diseases

Abstract

Crisis is one of the sophisticated yet important and practical concepts of Persian medicine which have been discussed and pointed out throughout traditional medical literature starting from Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna and others or discussed independently in their related treatises. Being so important, it was used to classify the days of illnesses according to days devoted to it (critical days) or the days forecasting it (warning days) and the days in between. Crisis was known to be an important change in the process of disease which afterwards the destiny of the patient was predicted. It was categorized by its completeness/incompleteness and its good/bad prognosis, timing and direction of the pathogenic substance displacement or excretion. Many factors have been known to affect the onset and type of crisis including type of illness, the temperament of the patient, the season of disease occurrence, and even the effect of heavenly bodies especially the tidal force of the moon and the sun. Therefore many branches of science like chronobiology, physics, nanomechanics, astrophysics and rheology are needed to understand and demystify the narrated information derived from centuries of clinical observation. This understanding may lead to the decoding of unknown causes of exacerbation and remission of chronic diseases like multiple sclerosis and so on. As mentioned in previous articles, we have also designed a set of treatments named SINA therapy to simulate good crisis artificially in order to hasten the coction period and facilitate the curing of the daily increasing material diseases.