According to wikipedia, Herbalism, also known as Herbal medicine and phytotherapy, is a folk and traditional medicinal practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts.
Finding healing powers in plants is an ancient idea. People in all continents have long used hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous plants for treatment of various ailments dating back to prehistory. These plants are still widely used in ethnomedicine around the world.
The use of and search for drugs and dietary supplements derived from plants have accelerated in recent years. Pharmacologists, microbiologists, botanists, and natural-products chemists are combing the Earth for phytochemicals and leads that could be developed for treatment of various diseases. In fact, many modern drugs have been derived from plants.
The use of herbs to treat disease is almost universal among non-industrialized societies. A number of traditions came to dominate the practice of herbal medicine in the Western world at the end of the twentieth century:
- The Western, based on Greek and Roman sources,
- The Ayurvedic from India, and
- Chinese herbal medicine (Chinese herbology).
Many of the pharmaceuticals currently available to Western physicians have a long history of use as herbal remedies, including opium, aspirin, digitalis, and quinine.
