Concept

Medicinal plants

Summary

Medicinal plants, also called medicinal herbs, have been discovered and used in traditional medicine practices since prehistoric times. Plants synthesize hundreds of chemical compounds for various functions, including defense and protection against insects, fungi, diseases, and herbivorous mammals. The earliest historical records of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilization, where hundreds of medicinal plants including opium are listed on clay tablets, c. 3000 BC. The Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt, c. 1550 BC, describes over 850 plant medicines. The Greek physician Dioscorides, who worked in the Roman army, documented over 1000 recipes for medicines using over 600 medicinal plants in De materia medica, c. 60 AD; this formed the basis of pharmacopoeias for some 1500 years. Drug research sometimes makes use of ethnobotany to search for pharmacologically active substances, and this approach has yielded hundreds of useful compounds. These include the common drugs aspirin, digoxin, quinine, and opium. The compounds found in plants are of many kinds, but most are in four major biochemical classes: alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes. Medicinal plants are widely used in non-industrialized societies, mainly because they are readily available and cheaper than modern medicines. The annual global export value of the thousands of types of plants with medicinal properties was estimated to be US$60 billion per year and it is growing at the rate of 6% per annum. In many countries, there is little regulation of traditional medicine, but the World Health Organization coordinates a network to encourage safe and rational usage. The botanical herbal market has been criticized for being poorly regulated and containing placebo pseudoscience products with no scientific research to support their medical claims. Medicinal plants face both general threats, such as climate change and habitat destruction, and the specific threat of over-collection to meet market demand.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_plants

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Medicinal plants

Insights Into the Dynamics of Vegetated Alternate Bars by Means of Flume Experiments

Improved framework to estimate travel time and derived distributions in hydrological control volumes

Time Dependent Image Generation of Plants from Incomplete Sequences with CNN-Transformer

Improved framework to estimate travel time and derived distributions in hydrological control volumes

Time Dependent Image Generation of Plants from Incomplete Sequences with CNN-Transformer

Insights Into the Dynamics of Vegetated Alternate Bars by Means of Flume Experiments