Medicinal plant

Medicinal plants, medicinal herbs, or simply herbs have been identified and used from prehistoric times. Plants make many chemical compounds for biological functions, including defence against insects, fungi and herbivorous mammals. Over 12,000 active compounds are known to science. These chemicals work on the human body in exactly the same way as pharmaceutical drugs, so herbal medicines can be beneficial and have harmful side effects just like conventional drugs. However, since a single plant may contain many substances, the effects of taking a plant as medicine can be complex.

The earliest historical records of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilisation, where hundreds of medicinal plants including opium are listed on clay tablets. The Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt describes over 850 plant medicines, while Dioscorides documented over 1000 recipes for medicines using over 600 medicinal plants in De materia medica, forming the basis of pharmacopoeias for some 1500 years. Drug research makes use of ethnobotany to search for pharmacologically active substances in nature, and has in this way discovered hundreds of useful compounds. These include the common drugs aspirin, digoxin, quinine, and opium. The compounds found in plants are of many kinds, but most are in four major biochemical classes, the alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes.

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