Malaysian traditional medicine 3: its' uses and practices / Norazlina Othman

Herbal medicine has been used for thousand of years to improve health and assist in the treatment of medical conditions. Medical condition that has been treated with plants or herbal therapy is also known as phytotherapy (plant therapy) or phytomedicine (plant medicine). Herbal medicine not only used for traditional usage but nowadays approximately SO°lc, of currently used medicine in clinical use are derived from plant origin. Medicinal plants are widely used in traditional cultures and nowadays they are becoming more popular in modern society as natural alternative to synthetic chemicals. Herbal medicine has remained as a choice of therapy because of cost, availability and due to cultural preference. Nowadays people are tending to look for herbal medicine as alternative because they has a strong belief that what is natural such as herbal products is always safe to consume. The objectives of this study are to collect all the 20 herbal medicines, to obtain information of traditional medicine, to extract all the herbal medicine and to evaluate some of the herbs on brine shrimp lethality assay. There are many problems to obtain information of traditional medicine because lacks of information and scientific evidence to support the use of plants in treating medical conditions. Most of people claim the herbal medicine can be used for prevention and curing some medical conditions, however there is also inadequate scientific evidence. Modem medical science is also taking advantage of many herbal and traditional plants in search for new drug discovery. fn this research, each plant is extracted by using rotary evaporator under reduced pressure at a temperature of 40°C. .Brine shrimp lethality test is used to investigate the properties of cytotoxic effect of herbal medicine and can be related as anticancer treatment. This test is also useful to determine the LCso of herbal medicine tested. In this study crude extracts resulting in LCso values less than I 00 µg/ml were considered significantly active and had the potential for further investigation. They were the extracts of Plant 17, Plant 2, Plant 7, and Plant 5.