Medical plants : change of use with time

Abstract: Since the beginning of time, the humankind has used plants to cure all sorts of diseases, both physiological and psychological. With the entry of modern medicine the herbal remedies became unpopular but today herbal medicine is becoming more and more popular all over the world. The herbs are not only used in homeopathy but also in more conventional school medicine but here the different constituens are extracted from the plants, e.g. Taxus baccata and T. brevifolia from which taxol and baccatin III are extracted and used as cancer treatment. The aim of the project was to see if the medical use of three medicinal plants has changed with the development of new technology and scientific progress. Each plant was given a short morphological presentation and thereafter the medical use before, today and in the future was presented. In this report some of the other ways to use the different plants are also mentioned as well as some of the countries in the world where the plants can be found in commercial cultivation. The plants chosen are Digitalis for its use as a heart medicine, Echinacea for the very common use in both treating and preventing upper respiratory infections and at last Hypericum that is used both in conventional medicine and in homeopathy as a treatment for psychological disorders. The three medical plants that I chose to write about have more or less the same area of usage today as they had from the beginning. For more serious infections and other medical conditions that are difficult to treat these plants earlier where considered as miracle cures they are no longer or to a very small extent used. This is probably due to the fact that with scientific progress and the modern medicine new and more effective cures where found. In some cases the answer is that the disease or the medical condition is more or less eradicated in the western part of the world e.g. child-bed fever and syphilis infections of second to third degree.