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Herbal Medicines as a Rational Alternative for Treatment of Human Diseases

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Botanical Leads for Drug Discovery

Abstract

Herbal medicines (HMs) are receiving considerable attention as the complementary drugs throughout the world due to their cost effectiveness, low toxicity, and therapeutic potential against wide range of human illness. These plants possess a wide range of bioactive principles which alone or synergistically act on different targets. Even in the modern era of medicine and technology, more than 80% of the modern medicines currently available and one-third population of the developing countries largely depend on plant products either directly or indirectly for their primary health care. Several plants such as Aegle marmelos, Atropa belladonna, Azadirachta indica, Catharanthus roseus, Camptotheca acuminata, Colchicum autumnale, Curcuma longa, Digitalis lanata, Eclipta alba, Ocimum sanctum, Papaver somniferum, Phyllanthus emblica, Rauvolfia serpentina, Taxus brevifolia, and several other high value plants have been well acknowledged for its pharmacological importance to treat important human diseases like diabetes, cancer, dementia, epilepsy, hepatitis, fever, kidney stone, malaria, mouth ulcer, and other important disorders in indigenous system of medicine. In spite of their great potential against different human diseases, the HMs have faced several acceptance issues for the practical application due to lack of scientific and clinical evidence regarding their biochemical mode of action on particular cells, tissues, or organs. Therefore, a mass-scale clinical trials and specific documentation on its molecular mode of action is needed. Based on the aforementioned background, the present chapter describes the documentation of important medicinal plants and their derived bioactive principles, potential to combat important human diseases with underlying mode of action to facilitate direction for reproducible drug discovery, which are safe, cost effective, and rational alternatives to the modern remedies.

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Abbreviations

CVDs:

Cardiovascular diseases

HMs:

Herbal medicines

TCMs:

Traditional Chinese medicines

SCM:

Sasang constitutional medicines

ROS:

Reactive oxygen species

HIV:

Human immunodeficiency virus

AIDS:

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome

EOs:

Essential oils

CAM:

Complementary and alternative medicine

IPR:

Intellectual property right

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Acknowledgments

Anand Kumar Chaudhari, Somenath Das, and Jitendra Prasad are thankful to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India, and Bijendra Kumar Singh is thankful to the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), New Delhi, India, for research fellowship.

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No conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Herbal Pesticides, Centre of Advanced Study in Botany, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Anand Kumar Chaudhari, Somenath Das, Bijendra Kumar Singh, Jitendra Prasad, Nawal Kishore Dubey & Abhishek Kumar Dwivedy

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  1. Anand Kumar Chaudhari
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  2. Somenath Das
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  3. Bijendra Kumar Singh
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  4. Jitendra Prasad
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  5. Nawal Kishore Dubey
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  6. Abhishek Kumar Dwivedy
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  1. Plant Sciences (Biodiversity and Applied Botany Division), CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR) Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India

    Bikarma Singh

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Chaudhari, A.K., Das, S., Singh, B.K., Prasad, J., Dubey, N.K., Dwivedy, A.K. (2020). Herbal Medicines as a Rational Alternative for Treatment of Human Diseases. In: Singh, B. (eds) Botanical Leads for Drug Discovery. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5917-4_2

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