Animals (and their derived products) are essential ingredients in the preparation of many traditional remedies. Despite its prevalence in traditional medical practices worldwide, research on medicinal animals has often been neglected in comparison to medicinal plant research. This work documents the medicinal animals used by a rural community in the semi-arid region, inserted in Caatinga Biome,...

Many herbal medicinal products have been found to contain synthetic prescription drugs as chemical adulterants. This has become evident by the number of toxicity cases and adverse reactions reported in which casualties were reported via analytical techniques that detected the presence of chemical adulterants in them, which could be responsible for their toxicity. The adulteration of herbal medi...

Traditional medicine is an important component of the health care system of most developing countries. However, indigenous knowledge about herbal medicines of many Ghanaian cultures has not yet been investigated. The aim of the present study was to document herbal medicines used by traditional healers to treat and manage human diseases and ailments by some communities living in Ghana. The study...

Biodiversity is an addition sum of the studies on genetic, taxonomic commercial and ecosystem aspects of living systems. All the living individuals of a species contain a distinct combination of genes and the intrinsic interaction among the gene pool influences evolution, survival and phenotypic/genotypic changes of the part of the biodiversity i.e. community. The amount of genetic diversity wi...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recognised the potential utility of traditional remedies and strives to preserve the primary health care involving medicinal plants. In various parts of Algeria, especially in the arid region, medicinal plants are widely used as an alternative to pharmaceutical drugs; the folk medicine represents a very important phenomenon in regional culture. Continuing...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recognised the potential utility of traditional remedies and strives to preserve the primary health care involving medicinal plants. In various parts of Algeria, especially in the arid region, medicinal plants are widely used as an alternative to pharmaceutical drugs; the folk medicine represents a very important phenomenon in regional culture. Continuing...

This chapter reviews the history, biology, and epistemology of medicinal plants as used by human beings and their primate, other mammalian, and other vertebrate ancestors. Focusing on prehistoric, classical, and ethnographic examples, it delineates the careful selective process by which people selected plants for use, it considers why plants are useful at all, and it describes some of the varyi...

OBJECTIVE In spite of the richness of the Brazilian biodiversity, no phytomedicines have been developed from this flora with the purpose of being used in psychiatric treatments. The objective of the present study was to document the use of plants with possible psychoactive effects in rituals performed by the Krahô Indians, who live in the cerrado savannahs biome in the central region of Brazil....

One of the biggest obstacles to progress in modern pharmaceutical research is the difficulty of integrating all available research findings into effective therapies for humans. Studies of traditionally used pharmacologically active plants and other substances in traditional medicines may be valuable sources of previously unknown compounds with therapeutic actions. However, the integration of fi...

The paper reviews the economic and traditional medicinal uses of the plants, Calotropis gigantean and C. procera from the published literature from various of India. The ethno-medicinal uses of the former species in Orissa are also incorporated. Their distribution in India, Botany, Physical and Chemical properties of the plant parts are provided. Uses of the traditional medicines and their auth...