Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeial Plant Drugs: Expanded Therapeutics

"This kind of systematic work is exactly what is needed for people to help bridge traditional Ayurvedic practice with modern science." -Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nobel laureate, current president of the Royal Society and group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeial Plant Drugs: Expanded Therapeutics is the first review of all the therapeutic sections of 456 plant drugs in the first six volumes of the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India. It covers pharmacognosy of classical Ayurvedic herbs, their chemical constituents, therapeutic uses, and doses on the basis of contemporary scientific literature. The book reviews the classical attributes, compounds, and textual references of Ayurvedic plant drugs and updates the pharmacopoeial attributes of Ayurvedic herbs and formulations to make them more industry-oriented and facilitate their implementation. Sanskrit terminology has been converted into English equivalents, and botanical names assigned to Ayurvedic herbs in the text have been reviewed in historical as well as contemporary contexts. This will assist those who are not conversant with Sanskrit or have found multiple names of the same herb in Ayurvedic reference works and in different regions of India. With these salient features, this book provides an added scientific edge to the new generation of Ayurvedic students, faculty members, researchers, and enterprising phytopharmaceutical scientists. In addition, the scientific temper of this resource will help unravel many of the intricacies of classical Ayurveda.