Can local health traditions and tribal medicines strengthen Ayurveda? Case study 1. Janakia arayalpathra Joseph & Chandras.

During a recent gathering of phytochemists, pharmacologists, botanists and Ayurveda experts in connection with an International Symposium on Plant Chemistry, it was discussed that Ayurvedic drugs should be standardised with a view to develop products with consistent quality and efficacy. Some of the phytochemists expressed the view that standardisation of Ayurvedic drugs is a difficult task because of the fact that most of the drugs contain two or more plants having hundreds of chemical entities. Moreover Ayurvedic drugs exert a synergistic effect and the preventive, promotive and curative effects of the drugs are attributed to the synergistic effect of the component molecules. Therefore, it is often difficult to develop quality standards for Ayurvedic drugs. What is generally done is identifying marker compounds in individual plant drugs and then quantitatively estimate these marker compounds and this is taken as a criterion for the quality/purity of the drug.