ABSTRACT
Validation of medicinal plants and other reputed phytomedicines seems to be the most appropriate approach for the endeavour because they are naturally valued substrates highly accepted in folk medicine and, therefore, economically competitive to similar agents. All the groups are cosmopolitans, except some Indian tribes remaining isolated in the Amazon forest. All of them are rapidly losing their ancestral culture under the massive invasion by industrialized society. Nonetheless, it was the long term use of native and of some foreign plants introduced by immigrants that was at the origin of the present Brazilian folk medicine. The on-going Brazilian program of validation of medicinal plants has been presented, along with a pharmacological study of one of the selected plants. The genus Cecropia is used in Brazilian folk medicine to decrease “high blood pressure”. The major national industries in Brazil did not survive the 60’s and the incursion of the multinational corporations.
