The Challenge of Non-experimental Validation of Mac Plants

Following a short review of the role traditional knowledge, beliefs and practices concerning medicinal plants and herbs from the newly discovered worlds have played in the past, in the formative period of botany and pharmacology in the West, the implications are indicated of the emergence of Cartesian rationalism in science, in particular in the medical social sciences. Then, the recent reassessment of the human dimension in human–plant relations is described in terms of the ‘rediscovery’ of herbal medicine, the integration of traditional medicine in primary health care, and the growing interest in many Western countries in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Despite the rather solid position of biomedicine, based on advanced drugs, infrastructures and technologies, the emerging limitations in finding adequate responses to some ‘new’ diseases, chronic complaints and mental disorders – characteristic for the more affluent countries – are shown to have recently not only strengthened the popular reorientation towards natural products and traditional herbal medicines, but also given an impetus to the recognition and validation of phytopharmaceutical products for health promotion and the treatment of some specific diseases. Thereafter, the long and difficult road to the scientific, experimental validation of traditional medicinal, aromatic and cosmetic (MAC) plants is indicated, highlighting the major obstacles of increased risk, extremely high costs, and prolonged times involved in the entire process. Whereas a number of utilitarian studies have been involved in experimental ethnobotanical research of these MAC plants for ‘new’ drug development, yet little emphasis has been given to the human dimension of the underlying people–plant relations and interactions. However, the progress made in the development of the promising ‘ethno-directed approach’ to drug development is presented against the background of the interdisciplinary input from medical-ethnobotanical and ethnomedical research, in which a growing