We shall not forget that all drugs of the past were substances with a particular therapeutic action extracted from plants. The use of the herbs and medicinal plants as the first medicines is a universal phenomenon. Every culture on Earth, through written or oral tradition, has relied on the vast variety of natural chemistry found in healing plants for their therapeutic properties. The Greek physician Dioscorides, writing in the first century A.D., mentioned about 400 herbs. Herbs may be defined as any plant that can be put to culinary or medicinal use and include those we associate with orthodox drugs, such as foxglove and opium poppy, as well as everyday plants, such as garlic.
Natural herbs have two advantages that surpass pharmaceutical drugs.
First, many of them do not create any dreaded side effects, and second, it is much cheaper to copy nature in the laboratory than to harvest its benefits through extraction procedures. Today we can clearly see the results of such a perspective. It is thought to have originated in the high plains of west-central Asia and has been used medicinally for some 5,000 years. Modern research has shown that garlic produces a by-product compound, allicin, created when the bulb is bruised or crushed. Allicin is the primary compound responsible for garlic's strong odor.