Contents: Foreword. Preface. I. Introduction: 1. Alternative systems of medicine. 2. Herbal remedies -- toxicity and regulations. 3. Ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology. II. Quality control techniques: 4. Adulteration and deterioration. 5. Factors affecting herb quality. 6. Sampling procedures. 7. Morphological examinations. 8. Microscopical evaluation. 9. Development of standardization parameters. 10. Phytoconstituents and their analysis. 11. Extraction of herbal drugs. 12. Thin layer Chromatography. 13. High performance thin layer Chromatography. III. Biological screening: 14. Pharmacological screening of herbal drugs. 15. Antimicrobial and parasiticidal screening of herbal drugs. 16. Screening for antiviral activity. IV. Legal aspects: 17. Good agricultural and harvesting practices. 18. Quality assurance and stability testing of herbal drugs. 19. Analytical profiles of selected medicinal plants. Annexures. Index. Acknowledgements.
From the Preface: "This text is intended to present elements of both methods and theoretical backgrounds of different aspects on quality control and standardization of herbal drugs and formulations. More emphasis has been made on classical pharmacognostical and phytochemical approaches dealing with different aspects of quality control and standardization by virtue of new techniques and these have therefore been integrated. In this respect, chemists/scientists will get some new guidelines and approaches on screening, evaluation, quality control and standardization of herbal drugs from different chapters of this book.
The examples and evidences represented in this treatise strongly support the quality parameters as well as the different screening profiles of therapeutically important herbal drugs. This will facilitate to improve the concepts of the herbal medicines on one hand and increased usage of desirable standardized conventional drugs on the other hand. Various parameters on quality control including good agricultural practice, pharmacological and antimicrobial screening procedures have been included in different chapters. Specific chromatographic analysis procedures for some selected plants based on marker compound analysis have also been included."
