ABSTRACT
Herbal medicine emerged as a science when voluminous research papers revealed its therapeutic benets in recent decade. The emphasis began to shift from describing what therapeutic drugs do to explaining how herbal medicine can work in enhancing the efcacy of drugs. In this chapter, we start out some general principles underlying the interaction of drugs with living systems. The interaction between drugs and cells is often through interaction with the molecular targets, or the drug receptor interaction; yet, we are far from the holy grail of being able to predict the pharmacological effects of a novel phytochemical substance, or to design a more potent chemical to produce a desired therapeutic effect. Nevertheless, we can identify general principles involved in herbal compounds.
