Online Teaching Resources about Medicinal Plants and Ethnobotany

INTRODUCTION Exploring plant-based medicines and ethnobotany (the scientific field that examines a culture's knowledge, customs, and uses of plants) in the classroom is a timely and valuable way to engage students in science. People have used plants as medicines since at least the beginning of written history, with ancient Egyptian and Chinese texts describing medicinal uses of plants before 2500 BCE (Petrovska, 2012). The majority of the world's people use medicinal plants for some of their medical needs, and the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes plant-based medicine as an essential component of health care (WHO, 2002).The use of plant-based medicines has skyrocketed in the United States in the past few decades, increasing from 2. used a non-vitamin, non-mineral natural supplement. Curricula and activities can be designed to give students the tools to improve scientific literacy and critically evaluate advertised health claims for plant-based medicines, which are unregulated dietary supplements in the United States. This classification means that, unlike pharmaceuticals, plant-based medicines can be produced and sold without safety and efficacy testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA; Institute of Medicine, 2005). Some argue that plant-based medicines have been used for many generations, are natural and safe, and do not need to be regulated as drugs. Others argue that this lack of regulation puts people at risk of harm or wastes money on ineffective treatments. However, the distinction between " safe " and " natural " is important, because detrimental side effects can exist in plant-based medicines due to the active ingredients, contamination, or interactions with pharmaceuticals (Bent, 2008); opium is a natural product too. Because many medicinal plants have never been tested using the Western scientific method, laboratory investigations of plant-based medicines give students the opportunity to do authentic science, with real opportunities for scientific discovery. Integrating current scientific problems into the classroom is a good way for students to apply disciplinary core ideas, engage in science and engineering practices, and potentially make valuable contributions to science or their communities (Van Horne and Bell, 2015). Students in middle school or high school can design their own experiments or modify existing protocols with their own hypotheses to explore the effects of medicinal plants on bacteria or invertebrate animal models such as the worm Lumbriculus variegatus (Straus and Chudler, 2015). People from all regions of the world have traditions that use medicinal plants for healing, and many students and their …