Medblog on-my-way

The Role of A Muslim Doctor

The Muslim Patient

Every human being is bound to feel ill sometime and somehow. A Muslim does not panic when afflicted with any sickness because his belief in the mercy of God, his faith in destiny and his faith enjoining forbearance and patience, all these elements give him strength to stand fast and endure his ordeal. However, he is supposed to seek treatment in response to the Prophet's (salAllahu alayhi wasalam)'s order. By accepting the Prophet's (salAllahu alayhi wasalam)'s statement that there is a cure to every disease, the Muslim patient builds up a strong hopeful attitude that helps him and his doctor to resist the disease and overcome it.


The Muslim Doctor

The Muslim doctor shares with the Muslim patient the two main characteristics:
the faith in God and destiny, and the conviction that there is a cure for every disease.


But the doctor must have something more; he is supposed to know, or at least try to know, the proper diagnosis and the proper cure. He must be aware of his mission or commission entrusted to him in his capacity as the agent of healing.
Being an agent, he believes that the act of healing is not entirely his, but it depends on God's will. It seems to me that medical doctors are more aware than others of the divine power and God's will. They meet every day with cases where destiny plays the major pan and they encounter the most unexpected results.


Our Prophet (salAllahu alayhi wasalam), on the authority of Yasir, said: "For each disease there is a cure; and when the (fight) treatment is given, the disease is cured by the Will of Allah" [Ahmad and Muslim].


The art of healing, which is called the medical profession in modern language, has been highly respected all through the ages. For a long period in human history this an was closely correlated with religious leadership and quite often confluent with magic and miracles.


Since the advent of Islam 1400 years ago, medicine has become a science subject to human intelligence and discovery. Nevertheless, the medical doctor has persistently captured the appreciation and respect of his contemporaries, especially as medicine was usually associated with other philosophical and social knowledge. In fact this close marriage between philosophy and medicine distinguished the medical history of Islam. The gist here is that doctor's prognosis included the spiritual, psychological and social sides of the patient over and above the pathological aspects.


I earnestly believe that in an Islamic state, all Muslim doctors in course of their every day practice, and when dealing with Muslim patients in particular, should keep this traditional prognostic attitude in mind. I am sure, if they do they will never regret the act.


But what is it that makes a Muslim doctor different from other non- Muslim doctors? From the technological and scientific points of view, all doctors fall in one category. However, when it comes to practice, the Muslim doctor finds himself bound by particular professional ethics plus his Islamic directives issuing from his belief.


In fact, the Muslim doctor - and I mean by this that doctor who tries to live his Islam by following its teachings all through - such a doctor is expected behave differently in some occasions and to meet greater responsibilities than other non-Muslim doctors.



1. The Public Responsibility

A Muslim doctor is supposed to belong to a Muslim community where there is some common cause, common feelings and mutual solidarity. "Believers are brethren" [IXL:10] Allah also says:


"And hold fast all of you together to the Rope of Allah, and be not divided among yourselves: and remember Allah's favor on you, for you were enemies and He joined your hearts together, so that by His Grace you became brethern..." [3: 103]


The implication is the Muslim doctor is a member in a Muslim community where the same body of the individual is crucial for its survival and development. The doctor has a big say and great weight in influencing his patients and in righteously guiding their orientation. Besides, he should be actively involved in propagating true Islam among Muslims and non- Muslims.


Almost all Christian missionaries depend on medical doctors when approaching alien masses, taking advantage of the humanistic service doctors render to poor diseased people. In a country like this where we live, the best missionary service to be rendered by a medical doctor is to behave at the time in accordance with his Islamic teachings, to declare his conviction, and to feel proud of it. Then he serves a good model that would convince others and gain their hearts.



2. Faith and healing

By accepting the fact that Allah is Ash-Shifa' - The Healer - and that the doctor is only an agent, both patients - irrespective of their creeds - and their doctors, fight their battle of treatment with less agony and tension.


I think it is an established fact that such spiritual conviction would improve the psychological state of the patient and boost his morale, and thus help him overcome his physical weakness and sickness. There are many examples where faith played a miraculous part in the process of healing. In my opinion, a Muslim doctor must make of faith the backbone of his entire healing procedure.



3. Reprehensible, Prohibited and Permissible Acts

More than any other professional, the Muslim medical doctor is confronted more frequently with questions regarding the Islamic legitimacy of his activities.


There are almost daily controversial problematic issues on which he is supposed to decide: e.g. birth control, abortions, opposite sex hormonal injections, trans-sexual operations, brain operations affecting human personality, plastic surgery changing physionomy, extra-uterine conception, etc. The Muslim doctor should not be guided in such issues merely by the law of the country. He must also find the Islamic answer and rather adopt it as much as he can.


To find the answer is not an easy matter, especially if the doctor himself has no reasonably solid background in the field of Islamic teachings. Yet, to gain such knowledge is very simple and would not consume much time as generally presumed.


In general, every Muslim must have a preliminary knowledge of what is reprehensible and what is prohibited. One has to admit that our early education as individuals is very deficient in this regard. But this does not justify our ignorance of the essentials of our religion and our indifference towards its injunctions. There is no difficulty nowadays to obtain a few reference books about our Shari'ah and to find out the answers to most - if not all - our medical queries.


The most preliminary study to the Islamic science of "Usul" would give the doctors the main principles of analogy (Qias), preferential application Istihsan) and jurisdictic initiation (Istihsan).


The importance of such knowledge becomes conspicuous when the subject of the issue is purely technical and thus lies beyond the reach of the normal religious scholar. Besides, there are many secondary questions that arise in, the course of dealing with patients where the personal judgement of the doctor is the only arbiter. There, as always, the doctor needs a criterion on which he can build his code of behavior and the ethics of his medical procedure.


To conclude, the role of the Muslim doctor is briefly to put his profession in service of his religion. To this end, he must know both: medicine and Islam.
By Prof. Mahmoud Abu-Saud
Courtesy: www.everymuslim.com

posted by Balqis @ 6:42 AM Comments: 1

What is Medicine-A Review

Medicine is the branch of health science and the sector of public life concerned with maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury. It is both an area of knowledge – a science of body systems, their diseases and treatment – and the applied practice of that knowledge.

An Overview
Medical care is shared between the medical profession (physicians or doctors) and other professionals such as nurses and pharmacists, sometimes known as allied health professionals. Historically, only those with a medical doctorate have been considered to practice medicine. Clinicians (licensed professionals who deal with patients) can be physicians, nurses, therapists or others. The medical profession is the social and occupational structure of the group of people formally trained and authorized to apply medical knowledge. Many countries and legal jurisdictions have legal limitations on who may practice medicine.

Medicine comprises various specialized sub-branches, such as cardiology, pulmonology, neurology, or other fields such as sports medicine, research or public health.

Human societies have had various different systems of health care practice since at least the beginning of recorded history. Medicine, in the modern period, is the mainstream scientific tradition which developed in the Western world since the early Renaissance (around 1450). Many other traditions of health care are still practiced throughout the world; most of these are separate from Western medicine, which is also called biomedicine, allopathic medicine or the Hippocratic tradition. The most highly developed of these are traditional Chinese medicine and the Ayurvedic traditions of India and Sri Lanka. Various non-mainstream traditions of health care have also developed in the Western world. These systems are sometimes considered companions to Hippocratic medicine, and sometimes are seen as competition to the Western tradition. Few of them have any scientific confirmation of their tenets, because if they did they would be brought into the fold of Western medicine.

"Medicine" is also often used amongst medical professionals as shorthand for internal medicine. Veterinary medicine is the practice of health care in animal species other than human beings.

History Of Medicine

The earliest type of medicine in most cultures was the use of plants (Herbalism) and animal parts. This was usually in concert with 'magic' of various kinds in which animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits), shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers), and divination (the supposed obtaining of truth by magic means) played a major role.

The practice of medicine developed gradually, and separately, in ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient India, ancient Greece, Persia and elsewhere. Medicine as it is practiced now developed largely in the late 18th and early 19th century in England (William Harvey (late 17th century)), Germany (Rudolf Virchow) and France (Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard and others). The new, "scientific" medicine (where results are testable and repeatable) replaced early Western traditions of medicine, based on herbalism, the Greek "four humours" and other pre-modern theories.[citation needed] The focal points of development of clinical medicine shifted to the United Kingdom and the USA by the early 1900s (Canadian-born)Sir William Osler, Harvey Cushing). Possibly the major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection in the 1400's of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was parralleled by a similar shift in European society in general - see Copernicus's rejection of Ptolemy's theories on astronomy). People like Vesalius led the way in improving upon or indeed rejecting the theories of great authorities from the past such as Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. Such new attitudes were also only made possible by the weakening of the church's power in society.

Evidence-based medicine is a recent movement to establish the most effective algorithms of practice (ways of doing things) through the use of the scientific method and modern global information science by collating all the evidence and developing standard protocols which are then disseminated to doctors.

Genomics and knowledge of human genetics is already having some influence on medicine, as the causative genes of most monogenic genetic disorders have now been identified, and the development of techniques in molecular biology and genetics are influencing medical practice and decision-making.

Pharmacology has developed from herbalism. The modern era really began with Koch's discoveries around 1900 and the discovery of antibiotics shortly thereafter. The first major class of antibiotics was the Sulfa drugs, derived originally from Aniline dyes. Major assaults on infectious disease throughout the 20th century resulted in (Western) societies where severe infections are rare. The industry is therefore in the process of developing drugs that are more and more targeted to one particular disease process (minimising side effects), drugs to treat cancer, geriatric problems, and long-term, chronic, lifestyle and degenerative disease such as high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and arthritis.

Practice of Medicine
The practice of medicine combines both science and art. Science and technology are the evidence base for many clinical problems for the general population at large. The art of medicine is the application of this medical knowledge in combination with intuition and clinical judgment to determine the proper diagnoses and treatment plan for each unique patient and to treat the patient accordingly.

Central to medicine is the patient-doctor relationship established when a person with a health concern or problem seeks the help of a physician (i.e. the medical encounter). Other health professionals similarly establish a relationship with a patient and may perform interventions from their perspective, e.g. nurses, radiographers and therapists.

As part of the medical encounter, the doctor needs to:
-develop a relationship with the patient
-gather data (medical history and physical examination combined with laboratory or
imaging studies)
-analyze and synthesize that data (assessment and/or differential diagnosis), and
then
-develop a treatment plan (further testing, therapy, watchful observation, referral
and follow-up)
-treat the patient accordingly
-assess the progress of treatment and alter the plan as necessary.
-The medical encounter is documented in a medical record, which is a legal document
in many jurisdictions.[1]

Source : Wikipedia

posted by Balqis @ 4:34 PM Comments: 3