Indian Medicinal Plants – Forgotten Healers: A Guide to Ayurvedic Herbal Medicine

Globally, traditional herbal medicines have played a vital role in health systems, and are used to treat various acute and chronic conditions without or minimal toxic effect. Herbal plants are often used as a natural remedy to cure various health problems including tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes mellitus, heart diseases, wound healing, asthma, pharyngitis, hypertension etc. Plants rich in bioactive phytomedicine compounds such as alkaloids, flavonoids, tannins and polyphenols have been used to cure illnesses because of their various pharmacological properties. India is always known to be rich depository of medicinal plants and various forms of herbal medicine practices are considered as “living tradition”. However, there is no collective report on the significant Indian medicinal plants and their current progress in medicinal plant research. Hence, the prime focus of this review is to identify and report the majorly used Indian medicinal plants that have grown in India and neighboring countries based on a complete research survey of local and international research articles. The review mainly summarizes the prominent Indian medicinal plants, their extract and its corresponding pharmacological properties such as anti-microbial, antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and anti-cancer etc. The significance of this review is aimed to provide a detailed and collective scientific evaluation of the key phytocompounds and its pharmacological action for the possible development of new ethnomedicine in the future.