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The Benefits of Studying Medicinal Plants and Ethnobotany (page 3)
by Kimberly Johnson, MD

One of the most ubiquitous and sophisticated uses of plants by humankind has been their use for medicine.

Reintroducing Medicinal Plant Use to Modern Medical Practices

The availability of pure active constituents from plants, coupled with the synthetic drugs that began to appear on the market toward the end of the nineteenth century, began to change the prescribing habits of physicians. It seemed far more sensible, for example, to administer an exact dose of quinine for malaria, than to use a foul-tasting extract of cinchona bark (from a South American tree). Still, crude plant drugs continued to dominate therapies until the Second World War. (Tyler, in Balick et. al. 1996). Since then, Western pharmacotherapy has been dominated by the preference for prescribing purified chemical compounds.

In developing countries, 80% of the population depends on traditional plant-based medicine to some extent (Farnsworth et al. 1985). Medicinal plant knowledge is embedded within traditional systems of medicine, which reflect the cosmology and ideology of a culture and often help to define the meaning of health and illness. Causation and classification of illnesses are expressed concisely, thus treatment options reflect a cohesive worldview. These systems continue to provide primary health care today and to produce effective, affordable medicines stemming from long histories of local use. These knowledge systems also contribute to the health of people around the globe, including in the developed world, as many of the plant-derived drugs are used today in modern medicine.

It is important to recognize that biological diversity is outward evidence of chemical diversity. All organisms interact with other organisms and their environment by chemical means. Evolution has provided ingenious chemicals not conceived of by humans. Plants, organisms that are fixed in place and cannot flee injury, have evolved chemical defenses to protect themselves (McChesney, in Balick et. al. 1996).

Hidden within the plant kingdom are the secrets of hundreds of millions of years of natural adaptation and hundreds of billions of biological experiments, which are in danger of being forever lost to medical science, due to the threat of extinction. Tropical plants in particular may contain more unique and varied biochemical modes of defense and survival than their temperate counterparts. Less than 1% of tropical species have been studied for their pharmaceutical potential (Balick et. al. 1996).

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References on this page:

Balick, M.J., E. Elisabetsky, and S. Laird, eds. 1996. Medicinal Resources of the Tropical Forest: Biodiversity and its Importance to Human Health. New York: Columbia University Press.
Articles by authors in the above text:

Tuxill, J. 1999. Nature's Cornucopia: Our Stake in Plant Diversity. Worldwatch Paper 148. Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC.

Farnsworth, N.R. and D.D. Soejarto. 1985. "Potential consequence of plant extinction in the United States on the current and future availability of prescription drugs." Economic Botany. 39 (3):231-40.

Farnsworth, N.R. et al. 1985. "Medicinal plants in therapy." Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 63 (6): 965-81.