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Medicinal plants are widely used as folk medicine 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 growing at the rate of 6% per annum.
Many hundreds of medicines are derived from plants, both traditional medicines used in herbalism [12] [13] and chemical substances purified from plants or first identified in them, sometimes by ethnobotanical search, and then synthesised for use in modern medicine. Modern medicines derived from plants include aspirin, taxol, morphine, quinine ...
The plant has been used for centuries in the South Pacific to make a ceremonial drink with sedative and anesthetic properties, with potential for causing liver injury. [117] Piscidia erythrina / Piscidia piscipula: Jamaica dogwood: The plant is used in traditional medicine for the treatment of insomnia and anxiety, despite serious safety ...
Ethnobotany simply means investigating plants used by primitive societies in various parts of the world. [7] Since Schultes' time, ethnobotany has evolved from primarily documenting traditional plant knowledge to applying this information in modern contexts, particularly in pharmaceutical development. [8]
Crude drugs are the dried, unprepared material of plant, animal or mineral origin, used for medicine. The study of these materials under the name Pharmakognosie was first developed in German-speaking areas of Europe, while other language areas often used the older term materia medica taken from the works of Galen and Dioscorides .
Ethnomedicine is a study or comparison of the traditional medicine based on bioactive compounds in plants and animals and practiced by various ethnic groups, especially those with little access to western medicines, e.g., indigenous peoples. The word ethnomedicine is sometimes used as a synonym for traditional medicine. [1]
The use of plants for medicinal purposes, and their descriptions, dates back two to three thousand years. [10] [11] The word herbal is derived from the mediaeval Latin liber herbalis ("book of herbs"): [2] it is sometimes used in contrast to the word florilegium, which is a treatise on flowers [12] with emphasis on their beauty and enjoyment rather than the herbal emphasis on their utility. [13]
Phytosociology, also known as phytocoenology or simply plant sociology, is the study of groups of species of plant that are usually found together. Phytosociology aims to empirically describe the vegetative environment of a given territory. A specific community of plants is considered a social unit, the product of definite conditions, present ...