ABSTRACT
Traditional herbal medicines and their preparations have been widely used for thousands of years in developing and developed countries owing to their natural origins and lesser side effects or dissatisfaction with the results of synthetic drugs. According to World Health Organization, herbal medicines include herbs, herbal materials, herbal preparations, and finished herbal products. Herbs include crude plant materials, such as leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, stems, woods, barks, roots, rhizomes or other plant parts, which may be entire, fragmented or powdered. Herbal drugs are finished, labeled products that contain active ingredients such as aerial or underground parts of plants or other plant material or combinations thereof, whether in the crude state or as plant preparations. Herbal preparations are the basis for finished herbal products and may include comminuted or powdered herbal materials or extracts, tinctures, fatty oils, expressed juices, and processed exudates of herbal materials.
