Treatment with what is prohibited (tadawi bi-l-muharram)

Question

If a Muslim person is gravely ill and in the throes of death, and a physician (practitioner of traditional medicine) says that if you give him such-and-such an amount of wine to drink, perhaps he will get relief — is it correct to do so or not?

Answer

If a devout, experienced practitioner who is an expert in his field prescribes that the cure is confined to wine alone and that a cure cannot be obtained in any other way, then the use of wine as a medicine to the extent of need is correct (permissible); otherwise not. So it is in “Radd al-Muhtar” (vol. 1, p. 147).

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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