Comments/Discussion
Since the earliest of times, people have used plants as a source of medicine. Eighty percent of the present world's population of humans depends on time-honored medical procedures and medicinal plants for treating health disorders. A growing number of researchers and lay people are concerned about the conservation of medicinal plants. Click on Conservation of Medicinal Plants and on IDRC Medicinal Plant Network, to see some opinions on this matter.
It is believed that about two thirds of the planet's plant species are located in the tropics. Some have said that because of this, most of our attention should go toward the tropical, developing countries to explore and preserve the plant life. They feel that it is probable that the important medicinal properties of the plants of developed countries, such as the United States, have already been discovered, and therefore the need for research in those areas is low. Click here for some insight into this. After viewing the last Web page, examine this one , and take note of the general the subject of the article.
Trying to analyze the approximately 240,000 plants on earth for possible compounds of medicinal value is out of the question. However, click here for another way of exploration.
For Investigation
For each inquiry, write your thoughts in a short paragraph for later comparison.
- Is it important that we should conserve populations of medicinal plants? If you believe that it is not important, give several reasons why. If you agree that it is important, give several reasons why.
- It appears that perhaps, certainly without giving up modern medical preparations, people all over the world over are making increasing use of herbal remedies in treating various illnesses. Can you think of two or three things that it would be wise to do involving the preparation and use of ancient, traditional, plant-based medicines?
- Many medicinal plant species are currently confronting extinction, or at least a serious genetic loss from their gene pool. The latter is a result of a drastic reduction in population numbers from collection for the preparation of medicine. A population can appear to contain quite a number of individuals, but if the genetic diversity is sufficiently reduced in that population, it may face extinction regardless of numbers. What can be done to help solve this problem?
- Someone once said that to know which wild plants are edible, all you really needed to know is which ones are poisonous. This is very bad advice. For example, the United States probably contains at least 15,000 species of wild plants. We know that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 plants are poisonous, and between 2000 and 3000 are edible. This adds up to a maximum of only 5000 plants out of 15,000 that we know to be edible or poisonous. It has been suggested that perhaps cautious trial and error is the way ancient peoples determined whether a plant had edible or medicinal virtues. The problem with this approach is that some plants, like Water Hemlock, are so violently poisonous that only a small "erroro/oo will kill you. What might be another way to discover plants of possible medicinal value?