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Biodiversity plays a vital role in maintaining human and animal health because numerous plants, animals, and fungi are used in medicine to produce vital vitamins, painkillers, antibiotics, and other medications. [1] [2] [3] Natural products have been recognized and used as medicines by ancient cultures all around the world. [4]
Marine environments may contain over 80% of the world's plant and animal species. [6] The diversity of coral reefs can be extraordinary with species diversity reaching 1000 species per meter squared. The greatest marine tropical biodiversity is reported to be in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.
Medicinal plants are used with the intention of maintaining health, to be administered for a specific condition, or both, whether in modern medicine or in traditional medicine. [ 3 ] [ 47 ] The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2002 that over 50,000 medicinal plants are used across the world. [ 48 ]
Generally, bush medicine used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia is made from plant materials, such as bark, leaves and seeds, although animal products may be used as well. [33] A major component of traditional medicine is herbal medicine, which is the use of natural plant substances to treat or prevent illness. [34]
phytotherapy: the study of medicinal use of plant extracts; phytochemistry: the study of chemicals derived from plants (including the identification of new drug candidates derived from plant sources); zoopharmacognosy: the process by which animals self-medicate, by selecting and using plants, soils, and insects to treat and prevent disease;
Medical use of alkaloid-containing plants has a long history, and, thus, when the first alkaloids were isolated in the 19th century, they immediately found application in clinical practice. [206] Many alkaloids are still used in medicine, usually in the form of salts widely used including the following: [ 14 ] [ 207 ]
A cat eating grass – an example of zoopharmacognosy. Zoopharmacognosy is a behaviour in which non-human animals self-medicate by selecting and ingesting or topically applying plants, soils and insects with medicinal properties, to prevent or reduce the harmful effects of pathogens, toxins, and even other animals.
The first individual to study the emic perspective of the plant world was a German physician working in Sarajevo at the end of the 19th century: Leopold Glück. His published work on traditional medical uses of plants done by rural people in Bosnia (1896) has to be considered the first modern ethnobotanical work. [18]