The herbal world is a vast chest of medicinal value.

 Scientists have discovered many plants to have curing abilities from providing relief from headache to treating heart diseases. Most modern drugs took its cue from old herbal cures.http://plantas-y-flores.blogspot.com/

Since ancient times when man first gathered the seeds, stems, leaves, and roots of plants, he has tried to use them to cure illnesses. Early man would boil, dry, or powder the plants to make herbal medicines.

In modern times, medical scientists have found that some of these plants proved useful, while others either needed much refining or were useless or perhaps even harmful.

One of the old plant medicines scientifically proved valuable is quinine. When the Spanish explorers came to Peru in the sixteenth century, South American Indians were using cinchona tree bark with its quinine to treat “swamp fever” or malaria. Quinine is still one of the best drugs for malaria.

Two long known beverage plants, coffee and tea, provide the useful drug caffeine. Caffeine is extracted from the beans of the coffee plant. Its pure white crystals are prescribed by doctors as a stimulant to nerve activity. Often caffeine is mixed with aspirin and sedatives used for colds because it offsets their depressing action on heart and brain.

Certain plants of the nightshade-potato family give man two medicines: atropine and belladonna. These will slow the secretion of certain glands and will relax over-tense intestinal muscles. Atropine will enlarge the eye pupils so that the doctor can examine one’s eyes.

People of old China, as in other old cultures, used many herbal medicines now shown to be useful. The ancient Chinese used plants of the Ephedra group which act like the modern animal gland extract Adrenalin. The plant they called ma huang has the chemical ephedrine which helps people who have asthma.

The shiny-leaved, tiny wintergreen of the north woods has a medicinal value in addition to its value in flavoring. Wintergreen oil is prescribed as a liniment rub for sore muscles. A cheap grade of liniment is now made from camphor tree extract.

Several medicines for heart diseases come from long known herbs. Digitalis purpurea, the common garden foxglove, was used by early peoples of Africa and the East Indies. Careful doses of digitalis extract speed up a weak, slow heart. By contrast, the drug aconite from the leaves of monkshood will slow down the heart when it beats too fast, as during high fever.

All parts of castor oil plants, grown as garden oddities, contain both the poison ricin and also (in the castor beans) the skin lubricant and laxative, castor oil.

The two most widely known narcotic-yielding plants are the Asian opium poppy and the South American coca tree. The coca tree is not to be confused with cacao trees (chocolate, cocoa) nor with the cola trees (cola beverage). Poppy seed pods yield crude opium and morphine; coca leaves give cocaine. All narcotics are dangerously habit-forming but are valuable in small, brief doses for severe pain.

Many other plants contain chemicals used in medicines. These include: juice of grapes, sugar cane, and beets (fermented to make medicinal alcohol); henbane and jimsonweed (drugs similar to belladonna); cascara leaves (laxatives); tanbark oak (tannic acid for skin burns); and several mint family plants (menthol, peppermint, etc. for tonics).