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Human uses of plants include both practical uses, such as for food, clothing, and medicine, and symbolic uses, such as in art, mythology and literature. Materials derived from plants are collectively called plant products .
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]
[3] [47] The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2002 that over 50,000 medicinal plants are used across the world. [48] The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew more conservatively estimated in 2016 that 17,810 plant species have a medicinal use, out of some 30,000 plants for which a use of any kind is documented. [49]
Paraherbalism is the pseudoscientific use of extracts of plant or animal origin as supposed medicines or health-promoting agents. [ 1 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Phytotherapy differs from plant-derived medicines in standard pharmacology because it does not isolate and standardize the compounds from a given plant believed to be biologically active.
While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the ...
In the Latin names for plants created by Linnaeus, the word officinalis indicates that a plant was used in this way. For example, the marsh mallow has the classification Althaea officinalis, as it was traditionally used as an emollient to soothe ulcers. [2] Pharmacognosy is the study of plant sources of phytochemicals.
Ethnobotany is an interdisciplinary field at the interface of natural and social sciences that studies the relationships between humans and plants. [1] [2] It focuses on traditional knowledge of how plants are used, managed, and perceived in human societies.
This article contains a list of useful plants, meaning a plant that has been or can be co-opted by humans to fulfill a particular need. Rather than listing all plants on one page, this page instead collects the lists and categories for the different ways in which a plant can be used; some plants may fall into several of the categories or lists ...