Folk Medicine in Bangladesh: Healing with Plants by a Practitioner in Kushtia District

Abstract

The connection between humans and plants definitely exist since the dawn of human beings. Not only humans (Homo sapiens) possibly evolved into a world teeming with plants in the African late middle Pleistocene period [1], they also from the very start had to use the plants as sources of daily diet and nutrition, and quite possibly for therapeutic purposes. That plants may have served to cure diseases in early humans is borne out by various types of fossil records [2]. There are manifold ways how ancient humans learnt the therapeutic values of plants, like trial and error, through watching the behavior of the great apes and other animal species, who instinctively partake of some plants for medicinal purposes [3], and also possibly on the basis or organoleptic properties [4]. Plants produce secondary metabolites having pharmacological activities, which can prove useful in treatment of diseases. Considering the possibly more than 250,000 species of plant that exist in the world at present, this represents a huge number of different secondary metabolites with a huge potential for curing existing and emerging diseases.