Medicinal Plants Of The Rainforest

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Medicinal Plants of the Rainforest
Of the 265,000 species of flowering plants that have been identified on this planet, only 0.5% of them have been studied in detail for chemical composition and medicinal value. In fact, modern scientists only know the chemical composition of less than 5% of the flora in the rainforest. However, indigenous peoples who live in the rainforest can identify specific uses for 49-82% of the trees in their local environment. In fact, 75% of the world population still use plants and plant extracts for their medicinal needs. Indigenous people of the rainforest provide priceless resources in the form of knowledge about the potential usefulness of medicinal plants. It can even be argued that the knowledge of tropical plants as medicinal resources is more in danger of extinction that the actual plants themselves. When the Europeans first came to Amazonia, the estimated population of indigenous peoples was 6.8 million, but by the early 1970's the population was estimated at about 500,000.
The use of medicinal plants can be traced back to ancient China, India, Greece and Persia. As early as 1552, the Aztecs that were conquered by the Spaniards used medicinal plants as “peace offerings” to the king of Spain who was on quests to find new medicines and species in the newly conquered land. By the 19th century scientists treated malaria with quinine extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree. In the 1960's scientists discovered that an ingredient in the Madagascar rosy periwinkle could be used to treat some types of childhood leukemia. Today two anti-tumor agents are found in the rosy periwinkle, one of which provides for a 99% chance of remission in lymphocytic leukemia and the other offers a 58% chance of life in remission to sufferers of Hodgkin's Disease. Before 1960, there was only a nineteen percent survival rate of people with Hodgkin’s Disease.
There are also many plants that contain chemicals that c...