Writing a comprehensive list of medicines that come from or originally came from plants could produce a very large book. The reason is that far more medications came from plants (or still do) than man has produced in his laboratories.
Many plants are medicinal, though they aren’t commonly used in western medicine. For instance, garlic, onion, hawthorn, slippery elm, boneset, feverfew, and mint all have proven medical properties, yet except in alternative medicine or use in a few older cultures, they are seldom used for that purpose.
There are still quite a few drugs that were originally from plants, even though man may have later synthesized them. Such is the case of the analgesic Aspirin, which originally came from the inner bark of the willow, especially white willow. The heart drug Digitalis came from the flower, Foxglove, and has been used for a very long time in folk medicine for the same purpose. Wild Cherry or Choke Cherry has been used for a very long time to help suppress coughs, and to this day, they are used in cough syrups and lozenges.
Some plants were used medicinally by the indigenous people of an area, and only gradually came to the attention of western doctors. An example is the previously mentioned Aspirin, since American Indians were using willow bark long before the settlers arrived, for virtually the same ailments it is used for today. Another example is the bark of the South American cinchona tree. Many people going to South America were getting a particularly hard to treat form of Malaria, passed on by a parasite in mosquitoes. Medications used were not very successful, and the death toll was enormous. Finally, South American Indians came forward with a treatment, and it was found that it cured the Malaria easily. While other drugs are often used today, many of us have heard of the substance that was discovered back then: Quinine.
Quinine is derived from Cinchona tree, and one of the active ingredients produces a relaxation and slight numbing of the skeletal nerves. Even now, many people have heard of quinine, but many don’t know that it is produced by a medicinal plant. EW56Bhttp://www.rain-tree.com/quinine.htmWH6PDZ6EFP
Sometimes the plant-derived drug was used for a very different purpose than the medical one it ended up being used for. For instance, South American Indians would dip the tips of their blowgun darts in a substance made from certain plants in the region, and use the poison darts to help with hunting or sometimes fighting. The substance acts by relaxing the abdominal muscles, and in large quantities, an animal or person would die of asphyxiation. Medical science saw the potential quickly however, and even today the substance, called Curare, is still used as an anesthesia.
These are only a few of literally thousands of examples. Research continues, though inadequately funded in most cases. One thing that most scientists agree on, though, is that we are just beginning to understand some of the health benefits offered by plants, but that there is an enormous void in our knowledge of this health resource.
There are other benefits of using drugs that come from plants rather than the man-made variety, too. They have fewer side effects than synthetic drugs, and they are much cheaper to produce, for instance.
The contributions to medicines that plants have given us cannot be over stated. In a world where we tend to think of medical drugs as something that are made in a laboratory somewhere, it is sometimes too easy to forget that most came from plants initially, and many still do.
