It is the oldest and most experienced medicine in the world, the practice of which grew and evolved alongside humanity. Since their inception, human societies have had a significant interaction with the nature that surrounded them, extracting from it all the necessary resources for their daily survival. This influenced how diverse communities, through experience, acquired knowledge of those plants that could improve their quality of life, as well as those with curative properties for various ailments; this is how many communities around the world found cures for various diseases using medicinal plants.
Phytotherapy is the use of plants or plant-derived substances with medicinal properties to prevent or cure various ailments and diseases. Thanks to the knowledge transmitted and shared by different communities and advancements in the fields of botany and medicine, it is now known in which parts of the plant (the root, bark, leaves, or flowers and fruits) the so-called active principles can be found. These are the substances responsible for medicinal or therapeutic effects and are used for a large number of conditions, for example, stress, anxiety, and insomnia; they are even used to help control blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels in the blood, among many other illnesses.
Medicinal plants are the foundation of chemical pharmacology or so-called modern medicine, since the isolation of these natural active principles allows for the creation or replication of various substances through chemical methods based on what nature had already created.
Phytotherapy utilizes products or substances with mild to moderate therapeutic activity for the treatment of moderate and low-severity conditions, or to alleviate and prevent symptoms of chronic conditions or help slow their progression.
Unlike pharmaceuticals that can carry undesirable side effects, phytotherapy offers great advantages, as medicinal substances of plant origin have minimal toxicity and, therefore, their side effects are almost nonexistent.
Diana Londoño
Pharmaceutical Chemist
University of Antioquia