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World Health Organization:

A medicinal plant is any plant used in order to relieve, prevent or cure a disease or to alter physiological and pathological process, or any plant employed as a source of drugs or their precursors.

A phytopharmaceutical preparation or herbal medicine is any manufactured medicine obtained exclu-sively from plants (aerial and non-aerial parts, juices, resins and oil), either in the crude state or as a pharmaceutical formulation.

Fossil records date human use of plants as medicines at least to the Middle Palaeolithic age some 60,000 years ago.

The number of higher plant species on this planet is estimated at 250,000. They contain a much greater diversity of bioactive compounds than any chemical library made by humans.

According to the World Health Organization, 4 billion people, almost 70 percent of the world population, use herbal medicine for some aspect of primary health care.

Plants help the body to sustain or regain homoeostasis, enhancing health by facilitating harmony and resonance between the inner and the outer. Therefore plants often have gentle and long-term actions. The many different ingredients in each plant will work synergistically to balance the body. Often plants are prescribed in a mixture, as it is known that in certain combinations herbs will enhance each other’s actions. Plant medicine healers teach that with plants, just as with humans, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Plants are by far the most abundant and cost-effective renewable resource uniquely adapted to complex biochemical synthesis. The increasing cost of energy and chemical raw materials, combined with the environmental concerns associated with conventional pharmaceutical manufacturing, will make plants even more compatible in the future.

The discovery, development and manufacturing of botanical therapeutics, either isolated from plants or delivered as food constituents, is likely to be a major area of plant biotechnology expansion in the twenty-first century.