ABSTRACT:
Use of plants as a source of medicine has been inherited and is an important component of the health care system in India. In the Indian systems of medicine, most practitioners formulate and dispense their own recipes. There are about 45,000 plant species in India, with concentrated hotspots in the region of Eastern Himalayas, Western Ghats and Andaman & Nicobar Island. The officially documented plants with medicinal potential are 3000 but traditional practitioners use more than 6000. India is the largest producer of medicinal herbs and is appropriately called the botanical garden of the world. There are currently about 250 000 registered medical practitioners of the Ayurvedic system (total for all traditional systems: approximately 291,000), as compared to about 700,000 of the modern medicine system. In rural India, 70 per cent of the population is dependent on the traditional system of medicine, the Ayurveda. The major hindrance in the amalgamation of herbal medicines into modern medical practices is the lack of scientific and clinical data, and better understanding of efficacy and safety of the herbal products. It requires thorough search for medicinal plants, proper guidelines for their identification, validation of the scientific methods of isolation of active ingredients, pre-clinical evaluation of their pharmacological and toxicological profiles, and lastly, the clinical evidence of their usefulness needs to be obtained.