Role of Pharmacognosy in Allopathy: Allopathy is derived from the Greek word allos means “other or different” and pathos means disease or suffering. In combination, it means “other than the disease.” The term Allopathy was given by Samuel Hahnemann in the early 19th century. Allopathy medicine is a part of the Western medical system. This system is spread all over the world and adopted by many countries over the world due to its effectiveness in an emergency. This system is drug oriented methodology that depends on three things viz. hypothesis, experimentation, and result of the experiment. The main methodology of this system is experimentation. In this system, doctors treat a disease based on the symptoms not based on causes. This system is also known as evidence-based or modern medicine. The main drawback is most of the drugs have side effects and for being out of poor people due to the high cost of drugs and also treatments.
In this system, the drugs are manufactured using synthetic chemicals or chemicals derived from natural products like plants, animals, or mineral sources. Various drugs like tablets, capsules, injections, tonic, etc. It also uses modern equipments for diagnosis, analysis, and surgery.
Role of Pharmacognosy in Allopathy
Pharmacognosy plays a diverse role in the discovery, characterization, production, and standardization of these drugs. It is used by pharmaceutical companies to screen, characterize and produce new drugs for the treatment of multiple human diseases. Naturally occurring drugs are not produced in mass quantities hence they are studied to develop synthetic biosimilars. Producing these compounds synthetically allows through modifications viz. increases in bioavailability, altered pharmacokinetics, and increased efficacy. These modifications transform a crude inactive plant extract into a powerful drug. Some examples are anticancer drugs, CVS drugs. Thus, natural compounds provide excellent models to discover novel drugs. Digitalis, the most important medicinal plant, is directly used in Allopathy medicine as cardioprotective action. Likewise, the importance of medicinal plants is studied in other countries to fight currently untreatable, life-threatening diseases such as Alzheimer’s, HIV, chronic pain, and malaria. Many natural drugs are under investigation in clinical trials for new drug discovery.
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