Ethnomedicine is a study or comparison of the traditional medicine practiced by various ethnic groups, and especially by indigenous peoples. Ethnomedicine refers to a wide range of healthcare systems/structures, practices, beliefs, and therapeutic techniques that arise from indigenous cultural development. Ethnomedicine is concerned with the cultural interpretations of health, disease and illness and also addresses the health care-seeking process and healing practices. Ethnomedicine and the history of medicine have in common the description of medical systems, whereby the separation is geographical in the former case and historical in the latter case.
Ethnomedicine is a specialist area that is not restricted to describing "exotic" healing practices, but it actually offers practical help in everyday clinical medicine. Thus, Ethnomedicine facilitates communication with patients from all walks of life. Moreover, an Ethnomedical Practitioner's observations and analysis within the scope of Ethnomedicine's understanding of the inherent conceptions held by their patients, with regard to illness and therapy, has heightened the medical and nursing fraternity. Thus, these practitioners are better equipped to pinpoint and respond to their patient's needs. Ethnomedicine is considered to be an unbiased science by it's proponents.
The geographical area that is being fixed for our research is the Indian Subcontinent. It is the seventh largest country in the world and a demo continent to itself because of the geograpical diversities. So, from around 45000 species of trees, there are approximately 3000 documented plant species which can be used as medicines. But the traditional practitioners use more than 6000 plant species and hence the famous treatment of Ayurveda came into picture. Therefore, we are documenting ethnomedicinal plants which can further help in developing new medicines and will be re-used once more. Hence we unfold the details about the other prospects of this database.”
The components of ethnomedicine have long been ignored by many biomedical practitioners for various rea- sons. For example, the chemical composition, dosages and toxicity of the plants used in ethnomedicine are not clearly defined. However, it is interesting to note that the ethnomedicinal uses of plants is one of the most successful criteria used by the pharmaceutical industry in finding new therapeutic agents for the various fields of biomedicine. Today about 80% of the world’s population rely pre- dominantly on plants and plant extracts for healthcare According to data released by the World Health Organization (WHO), ethnomedicine has maintained its popularity in all regions of the developing world and its use is rapidly expanding in the industrialized countries.”
Hereby, we produce a database of such medicines and their following characteristics with an appropriate front end to view the data. This is the first database that is being designed on Indian ethnobiological plants. It is a comprehensive database which provides extensive information of medicinal plants which include Botanical name, Family, Local Indian Name, Taxonomy Id, PubMed id, Habit, Ailments Treated, Chemical Composition, Phytochemicals, Parts use, References and Plant Location in India, Annotated medicinal plants integrated in the current version of database were collected from the existing books, databases and the available literatures in PubMed. Current version of IEMDB contains the 1,000 records of medicinal plants belongs to 120 plant families. We anticipate that available information in the database would help the users to readily search the desired information
