Poison or Potential?

STAE 3102 Johari Jalinas

Let food be our medicine and medicine be our food.

Hippocrates (460 BC380 BC) Greek physician

Finding the right plants, however, was often a matter of trial and error. The natives collected and passed on their cures through their own particular method of record keeping: oral storytelling.

An ethnobotanist talks with a shamans apprentice in Suriname, a country in northern South America. Because shamans have a vast knowledge of native plant life, they are vital resources for the ethnobotanist.

A plant biotechnologist extracts artemisinin from wormwood leaves. Artemisinin is a drug used to treat malaria.

Name of Plant

Name of Chemical

Use

Cinchona tree

Quinine

Malaria

The Babylonians imported myrrh for medicinal use by 3000 b.c. Mention of medicinal plants occurred in the earliest Chinese monograph (2700 b.c.) and in India (1500 b.c. in a religious text called the Rig-Veda). Physicians like Hippocrates used plant medicines, as did the Greek Theophrastus and Dioscorides. Dioscoridess Materia Medica was the classic textbook of plant medicines for nearly 1,500 years, and works by Pliny the Elder also contained valuable information on botanicalmedicine

No one argues that naturally occurring plants are responsible for many of our prescription drugs, but according to National Geographic

(Swerdlow, April 2000) the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) has approved fewer than 12 new plantbased pharmaceuticals in the past 40 years. Now. 2010?.....

One of the greatest economic values of ethnobotany may lie in the area of folk medicines. Indigenous healers first discovered many of these drugs. Whether you call them shamans, sorcerers, herbalists, or witch doctors, they are responsible for making available some of our most potent medicines. These medicines have come from native ecosystemsdiscovered by those living closest to the plants.

Thank You