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29 March 2024

At 90, Hamama is still popular doctor

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By Staff

During a dark night in Ramadan several decades ago, Hamama AlJunaibi woke up to prepare breakfast for her family.

It was not like any other night as the there was a sudden change in the atmosphere, trees were issuing sounds and camels were bowing their heads.

Hamama was so frightened that she stood frozen and speechless for several minutes before she was jolted out of her trance. She read Koran verses, mentioned God the Almighty and went on to prepare breakfast. When she woke up in the morning, she had a feeling that she possesses healing powers.

Ever since, Hamama has started to practice traditional medicine, relying on her instinct and the powers she seemed to have gained at that strange night.

Now at 90, Hamama is still a popular doctor who is visited by patients from her own village, other UAE emirates and neighbouring Gulf countries.

Dubbed “the doctor of Dhaid’, the veiled Hamama says she can treat many illnesses, including asthma, renal pain, fever, jaundice and even cancer in its early stages. She says she can diagnose some diseases by just looking into the eyes of the patient and that one cancer patient has fully recovered.

Hamama is also a midwife, having delivered most women in Dhaid on the edge of Sharjah emirate. She is also an expert in cauterization and massaging.

“My ability to treat people is just a natural power and instinct…it started when I woke up one night and almost everything was different…but the strange thing was that all our camels were bowing their heads down,” she said, quoted by the Dubai-based Arabic language daily Emirat Alyoum.

“It was a strange and different night…most surroundings were different and I felt very scared….I fell into a trance and when I woke up, I read Koran and thanked God the Almighty three times…I developed medical powers after that night.”

Hamama said she could also treat infertility in men and women, adding that she succeeded in treating a young man who had tumor in his leg.

“I can tell if a person is ill by looking into the eyes…I remember a TV team came to my house to shoot a film about me and I told a girl in the team that she is ill after I looked into her eyes…tests showed she was really ill,” she said.

Hamama’s fame has attracted not only people seeking treatment but the media as well. Well-known Emirati TV director has visited her house in Dhaid and made a film, which won the best documentary in an Arab festival in Sweden this year and the top place in the Gulf documentary film festival early this year. It also won a special award at the 2010 Dubai international film festival.

Relating her cauterization experience, Hamama said she first applied the technique on her own daughter, who had fallen ill.

“I saw a pigeon in my dream telling me to perform cauterization three times on my daughter to cure her…..when I wanted to do this on the next day, I was stopped by my husband as he was worried,” she said.

“I then waited for him to go out and performed cauterization…within a few days, my daughter fully recovered…I later started to apply this treatment on many other patients but I have now stopped because of my old age.”

What is cauterisation?

The medical practice or technique involves the burning of part of a body to remove or close off a part of it in a process called cautery, which destroys some tissue, in an attempt to mitigate damage, remove an undesired growth, or minimize other potential medical harmful possibilities such as infections, when antibiotics are not available.

The practice was once widespread for treatment of wounds. Its utility before the advent of antibiotics was effective on several levels: it was useful in stopping severe blood-loss and preventing exsanguinations to close amputations.

Actual cautery is a term referring to the white-hot iron—a metal generally heated only up to a dull red glow—that is applied to produce blisters to stop bleeding and other similar purposes.