Hypertension from the perspective of Iranian traditional medicine

Nowadays, hypertension is considered as a global public health issue and in recent decades, it has shown a growing trend due to changes in lifestyle.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare symptoms of hypertension with known diseases in ancient medical texts and to find a disease that had the maximum overlap of symptoms with hypertension.

In this qualitative study, reliable sources of traditional medicine such as The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, The Complete Art of Medicine (Kitab Kamil as-Sina'aat-Tibbiyya) by Haly Abbas, Facilitating Treatment and a letter for Health preservation (Tahsil Al-Elaj and Resale Hafez Al-Sehha) by Mohammad Taghi Shirazi, and some reliable resources of conventional medicine such as Harrison's principles of internal medicine and databases such as Pubmed, Scopus, SID, and Magiran were probed base on keywords to find a disease that had the most overlapping symptoms with hypertension. By taking notes from the relevant materials, the extracted texts were compared and analyzed.

Findings showed that hypertension has the most overlap with Imila (accumulation of normal or abnormal fluid in the body) symptoms in Iranian traditional medicine. Although this is not a quietly perfect overlap and there are other causes and reasons including dry dystemperament of vessel wall (atherosclerosis), hot dystemperament of heart or damages to other organs like liver, kidney and nervous system that could also lead to hypertension according to Iranian traditional medicine.

Finding the equivalent disease to HTN based on Iranian traditional medicine, could suggest a better strategy for preventing, treating and reducing debilitating its complications in the future. In conclusion, we can approach to hypertension with recommendations for reducing Imtila when we are dealing with a kind of hypertension that corresponds to Imtila. Therefore, if patient is suffering from another type of hypertension like dry dystemperament of vessel wall, it surely requires another treatment approach for reducing vessel wall dryness.