Anmerkungen:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Beschreibung:
"Since antiquity plants have always been a valuable source of traditional "herbal" medicines. Unlike modern medicines, herbal medicines have consistently demonstrated several major advantages, including a lack of serious adverse side effects, long-lasting curative impact, and an overall cost-effectiveness. Even today, with a plethora of modern pharmaceutical medicines commonly available, plant-based medicines and aromatics are increasingly in demand throughout the health sector globally, where they are used not only for the treatment of disease but also preventatively for maintaining good health. Thus, currently almost two-thirds of the world's population willingly seek side-effect-free alternatives to modern medical treatments and thus depend on phytomedicine for their primary health care. However, an inadvertent consequence of this increased demand for herbal medicines has seen many medicinal plants become threatened due to their initial small population sizes, narrow distribution area, habitat specificity, and increasingly destructive non-sustainable harvesting. In addition current information on the conservation, ecology and pharmacognosy of herbal medicinal plants is extremely limited. Thus, this book critically examines and reviews the current status of these aspects and includes several important case studies of representative plant species"--