It may be more reasonable to consider any health-related method or practice for which scientific evidence concerning safety and efficacy is lacking or largely contradictory a part of alternative medicine or the like. Yet, long before the dawn of the age of biotechnology, humans began accumulating, systematizing and successfully applying health-related observations from their interactions with the natural environment. Indeed, traditional herbal folk remedies have contributed momentously to the development of biomedicine. One such agent was opium, whose proportion of alkaloids like morphine is as high as 20 percent. Rather, it traces to the age-old tradition of growing the opium poppy selectively for maximum potency.
Alkaloids are a class of chemicals that includes many medically useful substances.
Atropine, cocaine, nicotine, quinine and strychnine are alkaloids. Most alkaloids are very bitter, and ancient peoples came to associate bitterness with both toxicity and medicinal usefulness. But the study of the chemistry of medicinal plants did not begin until the 19th century. The active ingredients of many pharmaceuticals in widespread use today are identical to, or derivatives of, bioactive constituents of historic folk remedies. Indeed, Hippocrates reportedly prescribed willow bark and leaves for fever and the pain of childbirth.