Al-Zahrawi, The First Physician who Described Dysmenorrhea

Abstract

Menstrual period is one of the girl’s puberty stages, in which any change can expose a woman’s sex life to natural fertility or infertility. Dysmenorrhea is a kind of pelvic pain that 50-90% of reproductive women experience during their lives. It is the greatest cause of lost working and school days among young women that decreases the quality of life. There is a great trend to use Traditional Medicine recommendations and prescriptions in the world. As a result, searching the literature and finding common points in Traditional Medicine and Gynecology is necessary. This way, opening up new avenues in the treatment and control of dysmenorrhea, possibly avoids wasting time and community’s investment and enhances the quality of life of women.While searching ancient PM texts during 9th -19th A.D., there are many overlapping conditions, which may mimic this disorder. There are not any particular terms and definitions for dysmenorrhea, while, it is mentioned in Persian Medicine literature under different names such as Oja-e Rahem (Uterus pain), Osr-o Tams (dysmenorrhea) and Oja-e Zahr (back pain).There are many management lines for women in the TPM literature which have been of great interest to physicians throughout the history, but among menstrual changes, dysmenorrhea is not the earliest concern. First explanation of dysmenorrhea was found in the Al-Zahrawi‘s masterpiece of Al-tasrif in detail. It can be helpful to test these suggestions as ideas for clinical researches.