Selection of medicinal herbs for pharma screening should be based on

1.Scrutiny of Available literature (both research journals and ancient text books.

2.Available data from local population on usage of herbs for particular disease.

3.Selection of right herb based on both vernacular/ local name as well true botanical identity.

4.Facilities available at researchers lab for screening relevant pharmacological or biological screening.

Definatly by going through the basic literature, flora and ethnobotanical sources.

Then by botanical survay of the herb growing region. After collacting herb we wud go through the preliminary phytochemical investigation, by evaluating the presence of phytochemicals in it by which we can ensure about proper use of herbs for particular disease. We can also perform some bioassays to analyse the biologiacal effect.

Other interesting aspect in chemotaxonomic plant selection. That is useful for choose family of plants with secondary metabolites and activities reported. This criteria with information from traditional medicine is an important tool in medicinal plant selection.

With best regards

http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_6/b_fdi_35-36/41537.pdf

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/downloader/vital/pdf/tmp/gq1cnknhjf1la12m6pq4ckib04/out.pdf

http://www.academicjournals.org/jmpr/PDF/pdf2010/4July/Ahmad%20et%20al.pdf

http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/jcchems/v54n4/art37.pdf

thanks for share your interesting information.

after passing many years from ancient era up to now many wars and catastrophic events have happened and a lot of strong information has been deteriorated.that is, knowing about all prior data is impossible. how we can initiate, figure out and select a new herb? At least, we now know that, there are many type of herbs remain to be enclose their secrets, perhaps we should look for a new herb Any way , a herb that we cannot gain its details. So how?

regards

to find out which herb would be useful to cure an "exact disease", at first its need to isolate phytochemical compounds from the plant. After that we may conduct various experiments with those phytochemical compounds against the disease that we want to cure. There are so many tests to do phytochemical analysis for one plant. Its depend on Which disease you want to cure or you can isolate all the chemical compounds of a plant. Through the phytochemical analysis we can also get information about the plant that has no details yet. In general researcher collect plant's information from the folk medicinal practitioners.

With one plant you can cure various disease....

Regards,

Here is one reference for you

I am studying TCM Herbology; our textbook is Materia Medica by Bensky. It includes individual herbs and formulas but doesn't always put the dieseases/treatments in western medicine illness terms because the schools of thought are different.

Thanks Carmen

You can refer "Gunapadam mooligai vaguppu" "Theraiyar yamaga vennba" and "Pathartha guna vilakkam"to get more information about the various therapeutic indications of medicinal plants. The Gunapadam mooligai vaguppu is available in National institute of siddha, chennai,Tamil nadu, India

If you find any herb being used in folklore medicine for some curative purposes, you can always try to find out the scientific evidence behind its use.

Another thing is if you are totally blind regarding the properties of the herb, then try to identify the herb firstly. Once confirmed the identity of the herb, try to find the herbs similar to it and from the same family, what are their properties and what r they being used for. Try to repeat the same for the new herb.

Another approach is the phytochemcial screening of the herb for the presence of phytoconstituents present. On the basis of their nature and pharmacological properties, you can select the work for your plant.

Once you know the name of the plant, there are many ways to proceed. Consult ancient Ayurvedic lietrature also. Like 'Bhavprakash Nighantu', 'Charak Samhita', 'Shushruta Samhita' and some newer books like Wealth of India, Indian Materica Medica, Chinese Materia Medica etc. You will definitely find the links to work on the plant.

Gud Luck :)

Read Ayurvedic text they give uses of herbs according to disease

You can update with Traditional Knowledge and information available with different system of medicine!

I agree With @Ashok Ahuja Sir

Thank you for reply my question

Its purely depend on the phyto-constituents and its synergistic effects as well as the bioavailability of the constituents. You can find the herb based on old literatures available regarding the in vitro activity and solubility.

Thank you for your reply

could you please introduce some of those references that you have already mentioned

Thank you for your reply

in my opinion, if i have not mistaken you are Indian, you have great availability for traditional medicine in your country perhaps you can put yourself as a pilot to collect more thing and enclose impregnable facts about herbal therapy.

Of course before us many many years ago a lot of diseases were and

those people utilized herbal thing as a rehabilitation we need to study more and more to use previous treasures that remain for us.

Best wishes

Glossary of Indian Medicinal Plants by Dr RN choprra publication available from NISCAIR CSIR New Delhi provide good information on efficacy of plants and phytochem constituents as preliminary information to extend it further.

THE AYURVEDIC PHARMACOPOEIA OF INDIA is the best book to know about medicinal plants and it's effect on perticular diseases.. but if anybody wants scientific data has to go for pubmed like databases..

Thank you for your email.

I could download all five volumes of the book.

Regards

@Reza Nemati .. Can u pls share the link to all the volumes of the book. Would be a nice help in this context.

Thanks in advance :)

I have attached all 5 volumes of the book everybody can download it.

Hope we can use the references and something like that AND UTILIZE THEM TO OUR RESEARCH TO FIND A WAY TO CURE DISEASES.

Good Luck

Discussion regarding herbal drugs and it's benefits in many diseases as mentioned in AYURVEDIC TEXT is a good platform to improve our knowledge. Thanks to research gate. But in my opinion as AYURVEDIC TEXTS are in SANSKRITA language, practically you need to take an ayurvedic physcians help for interpretation and application.

thank you.

It impossible to know that which plant is act on specific diseases because one plant having so many properties. The part of the plants are differant so properties of each part is different so it is not possible according to my best of knowledge. thank u

@Reza Traditional knowledge and Ethanobotanical knowledge give plateform to know about plants and their use

@Reza try this pdf which contains medicinal uses of FERNS . I hope this is useful .

Selection of herbs for biological and phyto-chemical analysis is simple if the young researcher follow certain norms like:

1.Look for the facilities available for his research in the lab which he is attached

2.Refer to ancient text books/literature of traditional medicines practiced in the country to which he/she belongs to.

3.In India medicinal herbs are extensively researched and documented in old text books like Charak Samhita and many others .Also many chemical and biological research papers are available (Ref: Text books published by CSIR ,ICMR on compilation of various biological activities of medicinal plants and herbs are there)

However, still the research scope on medicinal plants is vast due to the fact that

1.There is not much of data available on modern clinical / biological research on the rationality of POLYHERBAL combination effects which are extensively used and marketed.

2.Quality control parameters ( phytochemical markers with logical bioefficacy)

3.Controlled cultivation of medicinal herbs (utilizing tissue culture and green house technologies.....emulating the scientific methodology adopted for flouryculture in Netherlands)

4. Controlled clinical evaluation following GCP norms.

5.Research on the technologies adapted in ancient text books (to convert many toxic herbs to non toxic with medicinal valued plant extract would be interesting .

You can get an idea by consulting Folk and traditional knowledge, but sometimes it is not very reliable. For example, people in my country by folk knowledge used to think about that papa simetona, a kind of solanaceae, was good againts fungi, but results of laboratory tests did not prove that property. So our mission often is to validate the traditional knowledge. Another source of information may be the pharmacopoeias.

@Reza Nemati

Do you have the missing volumes also i.e. Vol II, III and IV for API. If yes, pls provide the pdf's.

Thanks in advance

Dear Alok,

Unfortunately, I have no access to those books you want.

sorry

If a particular disease is to be studied and if causative pathogens are known, bioassay can be used to check potency of herbal extracts against those pathogens

Dear Reza, et al.

Please contact the American Botanical Council, (ABC) located in Austin Texas (USA)(www.herbalgram.org). The ABC is the foremost authority in phytomedicine (herbal medicine) in the United States.

Best regards,

Stephanie Ross

Director and Clinical Assistant Professor

Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions

Philadelphia, Pa (USA)

Dear Reza,

Lets start with your question....do you want to know the general or phytochemical use or are you interested in exploring the uses not documented yet? Since for the first purpose I see many good links and references all over databases are available. For the later purpose, it needs time and lot of dedication. For Indian traditional medicine, I would strongly suggest to refer textbooks in Dravyaguna shastra which is science of herbs ....one can get the english authored book easily. (By Priyavat sharma etc) Also one can be in touch with the Ayurvedic practitioners who are certified by degrees like BAMS and further specialization for detailed understanding.

Hope this helps.

Best

Priyanka.

I think this is difficult in general, since any of the "traditional" therapies may involve most of the time just placebo effects, and, do not relate to any real medicine or to any reproducible diagnostic evidence (i.e. the diagnosis should not depend on the person making the diagnosis !!!) - therefore only a few herbs may be left to test for anything. And if there is a plant with any positive effect on any disease, one should identify the single, most active compound in it to show an effect on, for example, an animal model for the disease, or any effect in cell cultures, or, if safe enough, a double-blind, randomized patient study. If it really works and the side-effects are tolerable, one should evaluate the best dose. If there is already another treatment as gold standard, the new substance should be better than the existing standard to be used. Otherwise, patients would just get not the best treatment. So, it appears to be difficult to find anything better than existing real medicine, which is based on evidence, not on guessing around and using the same treatment just for anybody without any reproducible diagnosis.

Potential toxic effects, either from the herbs themselves (many plants are highly toxic), or by strong and toxic insectizides, fungizides .... should be tested in all possible ways to reduce the many side effects of using innefficient, wrong herbal treatments of suffering patients.

EDIT: If one has only a well-defined plant extract, i.e. a mixture of many unknown ingredients instead of a single, defined compound, any evidence-based test could and should be used as for real medical testing, depending on what exactly one wants to check for. There then should not be a difference between real medications and test solutions, but the extract should be well defined (but if there is any useful compound this may then differ in the concentration from extract to extract - one of the many reasons for failure of herbal medicine).

Brine shrimp assay method is useful

Other than the lead from classical systems, Bioinformatics can be put to use to predict the medicinal values/properties of a given plant or organism. For reference please see my paper " Prediction of Medicinal Properties of Marine Biota using Computational Bioinformatics Techniques"

I would suggest REZA that one can first undergo extraction in different solvents like water, petroleum ether, ethanol and acetic acid etc. followed by the pharmagonostic evaluation of the drug and phytochemical evaluation of the obtained extracts. This would provide the person with the chemical constituents of the drug. From its chemical profile one can come to a conclusion or can roughly categorize the drug to a class of drugs with similar chemical constituents/properties whose pharmacological and clinical use is known and to confirm the clinical efficacy of the drug under investigation animal models can be used and from the results the pharmacological and clinical use of the drug can be pin pointed.

@Sagar Borle. What constituents do you expect when you extract the drug with acetic acid as you mentioned in your post?

Dear(s), the use of herbmedicine can specified when you know the exact etiology, stages, present clinical conditions. the patho physiology is also important, than you evaluate the herbs on the basis of phytotherapy, and the Philosophy behind it,

@ Dr. Alok Nahata. Liquid acetic acid is a hydrophilic (polar) protic solvent, similar to ethanol and water. It dissolves not only polar compounds such as inorganic salts and sugars, but also non-polar compounds such as oils. 5%acetic acid (AA) to : ethanol solution is a standard for the alkaloids and it maintains its solubility also but the concentration of acetic acid plays a major role. As per Brain Alltonen a researcher from North Central University was successfuul even with 7.5% AA but founded less effective with 10%.

You could always screen your extracts against a selected upregulated/downregulated gene or protein associated with the disease.

A wide spectrum of phyto-chemicals belonging to a number of chemical classes or taxonomic affiliations (genus/species/family/class) have so far been attributed with medicinal properties. This thread is almost one year old. I feel that some one having access to CAS/SciFinder, can search chemical abstract database for "plant derived chemicals" OR 'natural products" and then analyse the search results employing their data-mining tools. One can create a matrix of compounds on one axis and medicinal property on the other. SciFinder is a very good but a paid tool available with Chemical Abstract people. Any one who knows to use a computer can accomplish the job and publish areview paper to help the entire research community.

Different systems for herbal treatments are available. Use herbs for specific disease in Chinese herbal medicine is different from Ayurveda and both differs from Iranian traditional medicine or European herbal medicine. At first you should decide you want to use herbs according to which system. However "Makhzanol Adviye" is a good suggestion for herbs for specific disease according to Iranian Traditional Medicine system.

@Mojtaba Heydari thank you for mentioning the major alternative approaches using herbs, but I think the question was more related to a pharmacology research. The "philosophy" of pharmacology in my view is to find one major compound which then will lead under a certain condition to a reproducible effect, independent from placebo effects. I think since decades all available herbs from alternative approaches have been analyzed with perhaps some new compounds, but I am currently not aware of any major breaktrhough in any disease by any so-called traditional method.

I just got some pics from my father who was on an alpine tour - and he has sent me some pics from plants he did not know. I knew those and did some literature check: one of them was one of the most toxic plants which can kill people and which was thought to be useful for many diseases, but since it was not useful at all for anything it is not used any longer. Modern medicine has pure substances against many diseases, but it would be good to check and stop many of the traditional but very wrong and toxic attempts to get money from sick patients. This might be true for all too traditional areas. I understand that some of the modern medications were derived by traditional plants (e.g. aspirine), but usually modified to increase the medical use and to reduce the side effects. I would be very careful with any plants of unknown concentrations of everything. I think nowadays a lot of pharmacology research may include the design of chemical groups to fit exactly into some pockets of the target structures of a metabolite, hormone, receptor, signaling molecule...