Ethnomedicine and Human Welfare, Volume I

Contents: Preface. 1. A panorama of ethnobotany/Shaukat Saeed Khan and Mohammad Neyametullah Khan. 2. Ethnomedicinal practices of Muthuvan tribes of Kerala/Johncy Manithottam, M.S. Francis and Y.S. Rao. 3. Herbal remedies for treatment of gynaecological morbidity/Ravish Zamir. 4. Herbal remedies for liver diseases/J.C. Gogoi. 5. Plant medicines/R. Jeyachandran. 6. Ethnomedicinal plants of Indore district of Madhya Pradesh/Madhavi Adhav. 7. Ethnomedicine and ethnotherapeutics/R. Aparna and S. Senthilkumar. 8. Medical anthropology/R. Aparna and S. Senthilkumar. 9. Cultural aspects of conservation of medicinal and aromatic plants/Shyam S. Mandal, H.K. Mandal, P.N. Jha and N.K. Sinha. 10. Medicinal plants in India and their conservation an ethnobotanical approach/G.V. Gopal. 11. Quantitative observations on multipurpose wild plants for human welfare in Pench Tiger Reserve Seoni, Madhya Pradesh/S.K. Masih and J.L. Shrivastava. 12. Strength and wealth of therapeutic medicinal plants in India/G. Baskar Rajan, Irfan Ali Khan and Atiya Khanum. 13. Tribal medicines in the health care of inhabitants of Adilabad forests of A.P./S. Imam, V.C. Gupta and S.J. Hussain.

"Man's interest in plants in mainly for food and medicines. The history of herbal medicine is as old as human civilization. In the past, almost all the medicines were used from the plants, the plant being man's only chemist for ages. Drugs are chemical substances, which by interacting with biological systems change their behaviour, which is used for the purpose of diagnosis, prevention, relief or cure of a disease in man or animals. Since his existence on this planet, man has had to depend on nature for substance and survival. He used medicinal plants to keep himself healthy. According to the studies on ethnomedicine and folk medicine about 2000 species are newly identified as drug yielding plants and are well known for their use in about 4000 drug industries of various Indian system of medicine. Phytochemical examination of a number of them has been carried out and active ingredients isolated, identified are being currently used as drugs. Drugs such as aspirin, codeine, pitocarpine, quinine, reserpine, sceopolamine, theophylline, vinblastine and taxol are but a handful that had come from ethnobotanical findings. Chemical examination of hitherto unexplored medicinal plants will help in discovering new drugs."