Research Needs and Opportunities
Much modern-day medicine is directly or indirectly derived from plant sources, so it would be foolish to conclude that plants offer no further potential for the treatment or cure of major diseases. Worldwide, the botanical pharmacopoeia contains tens of thousands of plants used for medicinal purposes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of definitive texts, monographs, and tomes on herbal remedies exist. But most of this information is outside current databases and remains unavailable to physicians, researchers, and consumers.
Globally, herbal remedies have been researched under rigorous controls and have been approved by the governments of technologically advanced nations. The scientific validation is good to excellent, and the history of clinical use is even stronger. Many phytomedicines have been used by thousands of physicians in their practices and are consumed under medical supervision by tens of millions of people.
Much unwritten knowledge resides in the hands of healers in many societies where oral transmission of information is the rule. Unfortunately, in many regions this information is endangered because there are no young apprentices to whom elderly healers can pass on their unwritten wisdom; the knowledge that has been refined over thousands of years of experimentation with herbal medicine is being lost. A major research opportunity in this area would be to catalog information on herbal medicines from thousands of traditional healers in cultures where these skills are normally transmitted through an apprentice system. Some organizations have recently increased their efforts to catalog endangered herbal knowledge from traditional medical systems in India.
Abhumka Herbal Pvt Ltd, under the direction of Dr Deepak Acharya, is trying to document indigenous knowledge. Dr Acharya has extensively worked among the Gond and Bharia tribes of Central India. He has documented their indigenous practices for healing various health disorders. We are now concentrating more on the regions of The Dangs (Shahyadri Range of forest) in Gujarat and Satpura in Central India. The lab aims to documents knowledge of natives of these regions as well as scientific validation of that knowledge. There is a greater need to recognize the downtrodden healers of India and provide them proper recognition. It is indeed need of the hour to provide them source of income generation, therefore, we are involved in validation of their knowledge so that we ultimately find a better, safe and cheap alternatives to allopathic drugs. This lab would formulize the indigenous knowledge and thus making it available for giant pharmaceuticals companies. We aim to share equal benefits among the producers, formulators and knowledge holders.
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