Toward Uniforming the Frequent Vocabulary of Basic Principles in Persian Medicine

Abstract

Persian Medicine (PM) references contain valuable information which can be useful for health preservation, diagnosis and treatment of diseases and can promote health in society. Introducing this school of medicine to the medical community requires a set of valid English equivalents to communicate PM's fundamental concepts. This study gathers the most frequent words in PM in three forms: Persian name, English or Latin name and Persian name with English spelling, and finally a uniform English and Persian name is suggested for every word. “Iranian Scientometric Information Database – ISID" were used to find those researchers in PM and Persian pharmacy who have a PhD degree and an H-Index equal or more than 4. Then all of their review articles about PM indexed in Scopus were analysed to pinpoint the frequent words of basic principles in PM. An expert panel of five including PM and Persian pharmacy specialists, and an English language specialist decided about the best word as the final suggestion for each concept. There were 17 researches with 478 articles 77 of which were review articles. Totally 62 words were taken out of these articles. In addition, the experts decided to add 18 more words to the list. This study provides a fairly exhaustive list of words of basic principles in PM. Using these words in future studies can contribute to the uniformity of the key vocabulary in PM articles.