[EBOOK] Handbook of 200 Medicinal Plants (A Comprehensive Review of Their Traditional Medical Uses and Scientific Justifications), Shahid Akbar, Published by Springer

Medicinal plants have served humanity since its beginning. An overwhelming majority of the rural population of the world still relies on plant-based drugs for their healthcare needs. Earlier generations studied these plants utilizing only their keen sense of observation, and undying dedication to humanity, uncorrupted by financial considerations. With the wealth of inherited knowledge about these plants coupled with modern scientific tools, we have been able to harvest the benefits of some of these plants. However, the scientific community has barely scratched the surface of these natural wonders. Pharmacologists in the field of natural products have relied for references of medical uses of plants in Indian systems of medicine on books like Indigenous Drugs of India by Sir R. N. Chopra et al., Indian Medicinal Plants by K. R. Kirtikar and B. D. Basu, and Indian Materia Medica by K. M. Nadkarni. These books have served as excellent references for scientists from around the world for decades. I have also utilized these references for this book.

Interest in natural products has exponentially increased in the past few decades and pharmacological research in natural products is expanding worldwide. With modern daily life heavily influenced with science and technology, the use of medicinal plants has to keep pace, and evolve with it, especially in the mode of their utilization. Furthermore, the spiraling cost of drugs and overall healthcare is untenable, and our sincere efforts should be directed unbiased to unlock the hidden secrets of these natural and inexpensive resources to discover new prototype molecules to meet the growing healthcare challenges of our time. The worth of these plants is only realized by those who have benefitted from them, and I would like to quote here my Prof. (Late) Marvin H. Malone, who said at the VII Symposium on Pharmacognosy, held in Brussels in October 1980, “No person willingly will take an inactive drug when he or she is sick, and no human will patronize an ineffective medicine man when he or she is ill.”

Conceived more than 35 years ago in the absence of personal computers let alone Internet, obtaining credible and comprehensive information about the included plants, possible only by hand searches and limited to available resources, was a painfully slow and difficult task. However, with the advent of Internet and paid publications of the twenty-first century exploded the information available on these plants. At the time of conception of this book, international emphasis was being placed to exploit local customs and resources of the countries around the world to meet “Health for All by the Year 2000”, the goal WHO had set in 1978. Although the self-imposed deadline passed a long time ago without achieving that noble target, there has been a resurgence of interest in medicinal plants in the twenty-first century but for different reasons, one being the interest in everything “natural”, and second the exploding cost of healthcare. Undeniably, unprecedented progress has been made in medical care over the past half a century, but at an unaffordable high cost. In 1980, after a sudden increase in healthcare cost from the previous year, the U.S. per capita expenditure on healthcare ballooned to $1,067 that paled in comparison to a new milestone of $10,345 reached in 2016, and still moving upward.

Selection of plants for this book was discretionary, but largely based on the extent of their use in the traditional systems of medicine of Indian subcontinent. Some of these plants have been extensively studied, while others are still waiting to be explored. The customary practice of describing medicinal properties of plants in abstract terms leaves much to be desired. For example, statement of being anticancer, anti-inflammatory or cardiotonic, does not provide enough information with all nuances of the nature of the past work done. In this exercise, I endeavored to provide sufficient information (where available) for each plant covered in this book, for the inquisitive mind to chart a rewarding future course of action, including the controversies in identification, variations in active constituents, and other reasons for variations in observed effects, etc. I hope that it serves the purpose for which it was conceived and worked upon.

[EBOOK] Handbook of 200 Medicinal Plants (A Comprehensive Review of Their Traditional Medical Uses and Scientific Justifications), Shahid Akbar, Published by Springer

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