Analytical Evaluation of Herbal Drugs

Traditional herbal medicine and their preparations have been widely used for the thousands of years in developing and developed countries owing to its natural origin and lesser side effects or dissatisfaction with the results of synthetic drugs. However, one of the characteristics of oriental herbal medicine preparations is that all the herbal medicines, either presenting as single herbs or as collections of herbs in composite formulae, is extracted with boiling water during the decoction process. This may be the main reason why quality control of oriental herbal drugs is more difficult than that of western drug. As pointed in “General Guidelines for Methodologies on Research and Evaluation of Traditional Medicines (World Health Organization, 2000)”, “Despite its existence and continued use over many centuries, and its popularity and extensive use during the last decade, traditional medicine has not been officially recognized in most countries. Consequently, education, training and research in this area have not been accorded due attention and support. The quantity and quality of the safety and efficacy data on traditional medicine are far from sufficient to meet the criteria needed to support its use world-wide. The reasons for the lack of research data are due to not only to health care policies, but also to a lack of adequate or accepted research methodology for evaluating traditional medicine” (WHO, 2000, 2001).