Traditional medical texts help the doctor prescribe the appropriate plant-based medicine. The worldwide revival of interest in traditional medicine is putting unbearable pressure on natural resources as increasing numbers of plants are harvested for their medicinal properties.
Regulation is needed before irreversible damage is done.
Even today many pharmaceutical drugs are isolated directly through modification of chemicals found in plants, or their development has been inspired by the structures and activities of plant compounds. In richer countries, herbal medicine is rapidly gaining in popularity because of dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of modern medicines and their side-effects. As pathogenic organisms develop resistance to pharmaceutical medicines, urgent efforts are mounted by companies to uncover more secrets of the plant world and new cures for diseases. Medicinal plants form by far the largest single category of use of biological resources in numbers of species. It is estimated that at least 25,000 of a total of perhaps 250,000 plant species have been used in this way.