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For more than 60 years, Hajja Amna Al Suwaidi has treated patients with traditional folk medicine, which was the only available means of treating patients before the development witnessed by the Emirates after the declaration of the union state.
Hajja Amina, who is over eighty years old and was born in the Shuwaiheen area of Sharjah, says: “My grandmother passed on to me the skills of traditional medicine, and I followed in her footsteps, following the methods that were common for medicine before the establishment of major hospitals and the spread of modern medicine.”
She added: “I used to treat many diseases with folk recipes, including, for example, treating irritable bowel syndrome with a mixture of ginger and thyme. There are also “solutions” that people with chronic constipation drink to alleviate the severity of the condition and combat stomach pain. There is also the “maql” herb that is sold at herbalists and has been used for thousands of years to treat a wide range of ailments, such as arthritis, sinusitis, and others.”
Hajja Amina treated her ten children for many diseases, and after them she treated her grandchildren as well, explaining that her youngest daughter inherited her experiences and when her children get sick they ask her to “treat my mother Amina.”
“It is true that herbs are effective in treating many diseases. A patient may recover from kidney inflammation by drinking fenugreek and frankincense, while the leaves of the carob tree treat allergies of all kinds, and with frankincense treat chest pain. However, with the development of medicine, we must be careful when using herbal medicine because each case is different from the other, and doctors are more knowledgeable about each type of disease,” she says. According to Hajja Amina, she was a “comprehensive doctor,” as she describes it. She learned how to set fractures and used to make a mixture with a dough-like consistency consisting of liquid milk or sidr, ginger, and fenugreek, to put on the injured area after washing it and then wrapping it with gauze. As time passed, the mixture was gradually diluted. She adds: “I used to follow up on the health of newborns and treated cases of jaundice.”
Hajja Amina concludes: “Folk medicine was an indispensable option at one time, but now there is modern medicine, which has a major role in promoting human health, as well as herbal medicines and doctors who specialize in this therapeutic branch.”
