Medicinal plants are of great value in the field of treatment and cure of disease. Over the years, scientific research has expanded our knowledge of the chemical effects and composition of the active constituents, which determine the medicinal properties of the plants.
FUTURE OF PHARMACOGNOSY
Medicinal plants are of great value in the field of
treatment and cure of disease. Over the years, scientific research has expanded
our knowledge of the chemical effects and composition of the active
constituents, which determine the medicinal properties of the plants. It has
now been universally accepted fact that the plant drugs and remedies are far
safer than that of synthetic medicines for curing the complex diseases like
cancer and AIDS. Enormous number of alkaloids, glycosides and antibiotics have
been isolated, identified and used as curative agents. The modern devel-opments
in the instrumental techniques of analysis and chromatographical methodologies
have added numerous complex and rare natural products to the armoury of
phy-tomedicine. To mention a few, artemissinin as antimalarial, taxol as
anticancer, forskolin as antihypertensive, rutin as vitamin P and capillary
permeability factor and piperine as bioavailability enhancer are the recent
developments. Natural products have also been used as drug substitutes for the
semisynthesis of many potent drugs. Ergotamine for dihydroergotamine in the
treatment of migraine, podophyl-lotoxin for etoposide, a potent antineoplastic
drug or sola-sodine and diosgenin that serve for the synthetic steroidal
hormones are the first-line examples of the recent days.
In the Western world, as the people are becoming aware of
the potency and side effects of synthetic drugs, there is an increasing
interest in the plant-based remedies with a basic approach towards the nature.
The future developments of pharmacognosy as well as herbal drug industry would
be largely dependent upon the reliable methodologies for identification of
marker compounds of the extracts and also upon the standardization and quality
control of these extracts. Mother earth has given vast resources of medicinal
flora and fauna both terrestrial and marine, and it largely depends upon the
forthcoming generations of pharma-cognosists and phytochemists to explore the
wonder drug molecules from this unexploited wealth.
Little more needs to be said about the present-day
impor-tance of medicinal plants, for it will be apparent from the foregoing
that the plant themselves either in the form of crude drugs or even more
important, for the medicinally active materials isolated from them, have been,
are and always will be an important aid to the physician in the treatment of
disease.
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