CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION Plants are gifts from God and have been utilized by human beings for basic preventive and curative healthcare since time immemorial1. In recent years, following the demonstration of the presence of active principles against many diseases and infections in a variety of plants extracts, there have been a great surge of public interest in the use of herbs and plants. This phenomenon has been viewed by some scientists as modern Herbal-renaissance2. Though, pharmaceutical industries are moving towards synthetics and biotechnology research in search of novel medicine in the 21st century, consumers are expressing a greater awareness of the risk of using synthetic products3. Therefore, attention is now focused on the various medicinal plants, their potentials, safety and their levels of toxicities if any 4. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a medicinal plant is any plant which, in one or more of its organs contain substances that can be used for therapeutic purposes or which are precursors for the syntheses of useful drugs5. Furthermore, medicinal plants can be seen as herbal preparations produced by subjecting plant materials to extraction, fractionation, purification, concentration or other physical or biological processes and which may be produced for immediate consumption or as a basis for the herbal products6. About 80% of the world‟s population uses medicinal plants in the treatment of diseases and in African countries, the rate is even much higher7. In Nigeria, due to the high rate of poverty amongst the populace, various synthetic drugs which have been produced for the treatment of ulcer are beyond the reach of the average citizen. Hence there is a heavy dependence on plants and herbal products for the 2 treatment of diseases especially ulcer. It is in this light that critical attention should be given to some indigenous medicinal plants such as Ancanthospermum hispidum DC, Pachypodanthium staudtii Engl & Diels, Phaseolus lunatus and Euphorbia deightonii Croizot in our locality with the hope of providing a fairly lasting solution to the health care problems.

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