OUR county boasts a proud history of supporting immigration and is a successful and cohesive multicultural, ethnically-rich and diverse cosmopolitan community.

Accordingly, November has been designated Islamophobia Awareness Month which brings crucial awareness to Islamophobia.

This year’s theme is ‘Plant a Seed of change’.

The goal is to emphasise the importance of how actions can contribute to big change.

Leading on from this, I’d like to reach out to all members of our community to enlighten you with information on how Islam has shaped contemporary medicine and positively influenced the care you receive to stay healthy.

When you check into one of our local hospitals, take your children to the paediatrician or undergo a surgical procedure, it’s likely you’re benefitting from the work of medieval Muslim doctors who laid the basis for medical practice in Europe.

The structure of NHS hospitals follows the model of ninth-century Islamic hospitals.

These early healthcare centres had open admission policies for patients of all backgrounds, regardless of socioeconomic or demographic status, akin to the founding principles of our NHS.

They were run by a large team of administrative staff and organised into wards by gender and nature of illness.

In addition, early Islamic hospitals pioneered the idea of having on-site pharmacies, governance procedures for maintaining medical records, infection control measures and educational programmes for medical students to get practical experience under the guidance of a doctor akin to the training our local hospitals and GP surgeries provide to medical students from the universities of Birmingham and Worcester.

All women within our community have benefitted from the pioneering work of Islam.

It was Muslims who introduced new fields of medical research and clinical practice, including gynaecology, embryology and a focus on the care of mothers and children.

Early Arabs contributed to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases such as smallpox and measles.

Muslim doctors were the first to incorporate surgery, then a separate discipline, into the study of medicine and to develop its practice and techniques.

It was Dr Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn al-‘Abbās al-Zahrāwī, known as the ‘father of surgery’, who invented surgical tools that are still used today such as syringes, forceps, bone saws and plaster casts.

He was also the first doctor known to mark incisions on patients’ skin which is standard procedure to this day.

Al-Zahrawi also pioneered suturing methods and cauterisation which is a surgical technique that uses heat energy or electric current to destroy tissue.

Cauterisation may be used to incise the skin, kill certain types of small tumours or seal off blood vessels to stop bleeding.

It was Islam that pioneered and developed general anaesthesia to ensure that when you have an operation you don’t experience any pain.

Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Al-Razi, in the 10th century, was the first physician who used general inhalation for anesthesia in the practice of surgery.

Ibn Al-Nafis, a 13th-century Arab physician, described the circulation of blood out of the heart and into the lungs more than 300 years before William Harvey. He also provided early insights into the coronary and capillary circulations of the heart.

His ground-breaking research on cardiovascular and respiratory anatomy and physiology formed the foundation that enabled life-saving heart and lung surgery to be developed.

The health of our children is of paramount importance and falls within the medical speciality of ‘paediatrics’.

It was Dr Al-Razi from Iran who published more than 200 scientific papers including The Diseases of Children which was the first text to distinguish paediatrics as a separate field of medicine.

His work founded the speciality of paediatrics and he is considered the ‘father of paediatrics’.

However, his brilliance and influence upon medicine didn’t stop there.

Dr Al-Razi pioneered the speciality of ophthalmology (disorders of the eye) and was the first doctor to write about immunology and allergy.

He discovered allergic asthma and was the first doctor to suggest that a fever was a defence mechanism against infection.

The concept of holistic medicine, which integrates social, psychological and biological factors to understand and treat all facets of illness and disease, was the pioneering work of Islamic physician Ibn Sina.

Today all medical students and junior doctors in the UK are trained and assessed on the importance of treating patients holistically.

The NHS has a diverse workforce with an estimated 3.3 per cent of the 1.4 million NHS workers being from a Muslim background.

I would urge everyone in our community to continue to support immigration and embrace the excellence of Islam in shaping modern-day medicine.

We must all learn, value and respect each other to ensure that every member of our community stays healthy.

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Author: Columnist Dr Jason Seewoodhary is a former Worcestershire GP.