In recent years interest in medicinal plants has increased considerably world wide. It has also drawn the attention form common men in general and scholars in the medical streams particular due to sharp rise in problems as a result of adverse/side effects of modern medical science treatments, methods and medicines. In the today’s advanced technological era, pharmaceutical companies are launching new medicines every now and then without sound rational and scientific evidence. Their consequences are only known after 10-20 years of their continuous use. By then it may have caused a very serious damage to the public health. This poses a serious threat to the health of the common men, particulatly in a country like India, where majority of the people live in villages and lie below poverty line and unable to afford costly medical treatment. For instance, sharp increase in diabetes mellitus among people is observed in recent times and some antibiotics were found responsible for it. Even medical practitioners have started acknowledging the fact now that for most of the diseases the real culprits are either doctors themselves or the medicines they prescribes to the patients. In the light of the above, the curiosity about the sources of the medicines, medicinal plants in most of the cases, has drawn considerable interest among all quarters of the medical science. This further paves the way for the quest for the authentic literature related to the systematic classification of the medicinal plants with the updated information in detail. It won’t be out of place to mention here that in spite of availability of a lot of books on medicinal plants in the market, readers are not found them satisfactory as their issues are not adequately addressed and hence, not successfully fulfill their requirements. Some books have focused in detail on a particular aspect of medicinal plants while neglecting the others, whereas, other books are good from botanical perspective but not found appropriate from the point of view of Ayurveda. Even some Ayurvedic books on medicinal plants found contradicting with the ancient classical books on Ayurveda and observed incorrect. Similarly, classic Ayurvedic books have not found acceptability due their lack of botanical coverage. It all leads to chaos and confusion in identification of medicinal plants among academicians, practitioners and research scholars. Authors has identified the need for a balanced literature on medicinal plants which may be appropriate for both the people from botany and Ayurveda. This was the major motivation behind writing this book.
In addition, in the absence of proper knowledge related to the identification of medicinal plants, many plants remained either unidentified or wrongly identified. As a result, many important and precious medicinal plants are often considered as weeds and disposed off as waste material. Wrong identification even lead towards more serious repercussions as these may be used wrongly in preparing medicines for which they are not recommended due to different chemical constituents, and hence deprived of their actual uses.
In this book, an attempt is made to fill the above identified gaps. This book will be of immense use to Ayurveda experts, teachers, students of post graduates and under graduate Ayurvedic courses, researchers, students of botany, scientists, pharmacologists, pharmaceutical organizations, pharmacists, biochemists, medical men and even common men.
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