Orchids are all belonging to appendix 2 and the whole genus of pahediophylum is belonging to appendix 1 of cites.There are rigorous restrictions imposed also.I personally work on Dendrobiums.I have faced alot of difficulties in getting them.Secondly another problem lies in extracting DNA.lastly, awareness is very less what i feel.Apart from China and some works from India nowdays i heardly find any person working on them.

This might help you

http://inforesights.com/mcdd/files/mcdd2v2i4.pdf

Cites can be the main reason, but despite that you can buy some dryied orchids throught ebay without problems, for example Gastrodia elata (gastrodianin, gastrodin) is popular in Chinese medicine, they are using it for everything and i have read somewhere that it have somethint to do with healing of cancer... but i do not know where it was writen and if it was on some scientific paper....

also Bletilla species .....

Yeah its right,but if you you work on conservation aspects you need to submit the accession /voucher specimens to a repository.in those cases alot of problems arises.In india specially any repository will ask for flowers, and that is a very big hurdle.secondly it is very difficult to identify the spcies once you dry the stems.As for example stems of Dendrobium crysanthum and dendrobium nobile will look identical.How will you confirm.If you use these samples and go or sequencing studies a lot of ambiguity will arise.In reality, CITES have made such rules which are directly prohibiting the researchers to do any sort of research.

Thank you for the information. I was curious about this issue because there are some wild medicinal orchids (example, Dendrobium crumenatum - pigeon orchid) growing around our neighbourhood which we did not bother about it at all. Moreover, some of the aborigines/locals have been using them as medicine for a long time. It's possible that they knew how to differentiate these orchids morphologically and also, their population and distributions.

Orchids hardly produce seeds (pods), and even that seeds need a symbiotic association for their germination. So, naturally germination of orchids is a difficult process. That may be the reason why you couldn't got much scientific research papers on Orchids...

Several species of Orchids are used in traditional medicine in Nepal. Its true that commercial exploitation is restricted but there is no problem at all for traditional use. I can provide a list of few species.

Hi Clement, unfortunately, Medicinal orchids fall under the catagory of Alternate Medicine or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and thus it is very difficult to get official funding from the regular "western-medicine focus" medical councils. I think Ayurvedic medicine (from South Asia) colleagues are facing the similar issues about funding. Here is a short layman article that we wrote about the use of orchids in TCM.

Clement, several years back, we managed to secure some limited funding and did some work using Gastrodia (Tianma) from China. The aim was to later compare them (the well characterisied ones from China) with local orchids (Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore) and move on from there. Unfortunately, the funding ran out despite us being able to extract out some useful compounds.

Article Evaluation of the extraction efficiency of thermally labile ...

Clement, the best mimic of TCM usage is to use water instead of organic solvents to extract out the putative compounds. Our PhD student was able to use water at certain temperature and pressure to extract out the compounds.

Article Determination of gastrodin and vanillyl alcohol inGastrodia ...

The traditional way of preparing Traditional Chinese Medicine is to use 3 bowls of water and cook it till only one bowl of extract is left for consumption. This traditional idea form the basis of our JCA review article about using greener solvents (meaning water) for chemical extraction to best mimic the situation when consuming TCM under typical home kitchen situation.

Hope all these sharing helps to clarify the situation about Medicinal Orchids?

Article Determination of gastrodin and vanillyl alcohol inGastrodia ...

Good review article in this area in Orchid Biology: Three orchids used as herbal medicines in China: an attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western pharmacology

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-017-2498-2_6

Thank you so much, Dr Jean Yong. These information are really helpful. I have a clear view of the research scenario.

Yes you are right, Orchids have narrow ecological nich therefore production of them in the fields need control of environmental condition

Even orchids are produce microscopic seeds and are viable on moist bark or on terrestrial land but their propagation by tissue culture methods doing well ... Vanilla and Dendrobium are effectively used as medicinal plants

We are just waking up to reality in tropical Africa. We are, for the first time, going back to research into indigenous knowledge. Unfortunately, the sources of those knowledge have passed on. We are left with picking bits and pieces together. That the coming generation may not complain of the same thing let us go back to our origing and put together existing facts for verification in the laboratories with modern technologies.

Hi Clement, actually quite many orchids are used for medicinal purpose (eg. Dendrobium spp, Anoectohilus spp. Gastrodia spp.). You can search these species in google scholar and I did find a lots of papers related. ex. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968089608003787