Traditional medicine
Traditional medicine refers to the knowledge, skills, and practices rooted in the cultural beliefs of various societies, especially indigenous groups, used with the intent of treating illness and maintaining health.
In some Asian and African countries, up to 80% of people rely on traditional medicine for primary health care. Traditional medicine includes systems like Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Unani. The World Health Organization supports their integration, but warns of potential risks and calls for more research on their safety and effectiveness.
The use of medicinal herbs spans over 5,000 years, beginning with ancient civilizations like the Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese, evolving through Greek, Roman, Islamic, and medieval European traditions, and continuing into colonial America, with beliefs passed down, translated, and expanded across cultures and centuries. Indigenous folk medicine is traditionally passed down orally within communities, often through designated healers like shamans or midwives, and remains practiced based on personal belief, community trust, and perceived effectiveness—even as broader cultural acceptance wanes.
Traditional medicine faces criticism due to absence of scientific evidence and safety concerns from unregulated natural remedies and the use of endangered animals, like slow lorises, sharks, elephants, and pangolins, which contributes to biodiversity loss and illegal wildlife trade.
Usage and history
Classical history
In the written record, the study of herbs dates back 5,000 years to the ancient Sumerians, who described various medicinal uses for plants. In Ancient Egyptian medicine, the Ebers papyrus from c. 1552 BC records a list of folk remedies and magical medical practices.Many herbs and minerals used in Ayurveda were described by ancient Indian herbalists such as Charaka and Sushruta during the 1st millennium BC. The first Chinese herbal book was the Shennong Bencaojing, compiled during the Han dynasty but dating back to a much earlier date, which was later augmented as the Yaoxing Lun during the Tang dynasty. Early recognised Greek compilers of existing and current herbal knowledge include Pythagoras and his followers, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Galen.
Roman sources included Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Celsus's De Medicina. Pedanius Dioscorides drew on and corrected earlier authors for his De Materia Medica, adding much new material; the work was translated into several languages, and Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew names were added to it over the centuries. Latin manuscripts of De Materia Medica were combined with a Latin herbal by Apuleius Platonicus and were incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon codex Cotton Vitellius C.III. These early Greek and Roman compilations became the backbone of European medical theory and were translated by the Persian Avicenna, the Persian Rhazes and the Jewish Maimonides.
Some fossils have been used in traditional medicine since antiquity.
Medieval and later
Arabic indigenous medicine developed from the conflict between the magic-based medicine of the Bedouins and the Arabic translations of the Hellenic and Ayurvedic medical traditions. Spanish medicine was influenced by the Arabs from 711 to 1492. Islamic physicians and Muslim botanists such as al-Dinawari and Ibn al-Baitar significantly expanded on the earlier knowledge of materia medica. The most famous Persian medical treatise was Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine, which was an early pharmacopoeia and introduced clinical trials. The Canon was translated into Latin in the 12th century and remained a medical authority in Europe until the 17th century. The Unani system of traditional medicine is also based on the Canon.Translations of the early Roman-Greek compilations were made into German by Hieronymus Bock whose herbal, published in 1546, was called Kreuter Buch. The book was translated into Dutch as Pemptades by Rembert Dodoens, and from Dutch into English by Carolus Clusius,, published by Henry Lyte in 1578 as A Nievve Herball. This became John Gerard's Herball or General Historie of Plantes. Each new work was a compilation of existing texts with new additions.
Women's folk knowledge existed in undocumented parallel with these texts. Forty-four drugs, diluents, flavouring agents and emollients mentioned by Dioscorides are still listed in the official pharmacopoeias of Europe. The Puritans took Gerard's work to the United States where it influenced American Indigenous medicine.
Francisco Hernández, physician to Philip II of Spain spent the years 1571–1577 gathering information in Mexico and then wrote Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, many versions of which have been published including one by Francisco Ximénez. Both Hernandez and Ximenez fitted Aztec ethnomedicinal information into the European concepts of disease such as "warm", "cold", and "moist", but it is not clear that the Aztecs used these categories. Juan de Esteyneffer's Florilegio medicinal de todas las enfermedades compiled European texts and added 35 Mexican plants.
Martín de la Cruz wrote a herbal in Nahuatl which was translated into Latin by Juan Badiano as Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis or Codex Barberini, Latin 241 and given to King Carlos V of Spain in 1552. It was apparently written in haste and influenced by the European occupation of the previous 30 years. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's used ethnographic methods to compile his codices that then became the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, published in 1793. Castore Durante published his Herbario Nuovo in 1585 describing medicinal plants from Europe and the East and West Indies. It was translated into German in 1609 and Italian editions were published for the next century.
Colonial America
In 17th and 18th-century America, traditional folk healers, frequently women, used herbal remedies, cupping and leeching. Native American traditional herbal medicine introduced cures for malaria, dysentery, scurvy, non-venereal syphilis, and goiter problems. Many of these herbal and folk remedies continued on through the 19th and into the 20th century, with some plant medicines forming the basis for modern pharmacology.Modern usage
The prevalence of folk medicine in certain areas of the world varies according to cultural norms. Some modern medicine is based on plant phytochemicals that had been used in folk medicine. Researchers state that many of the alternative treatments are "statistically indistinguishable from placebo treatments".A new WHO strategic technical advisory group for traditional medicine was launched in December 2025 at a global summit in India with the intent of using the scientific method and modern technology to reevaluate potential integration of traditional medicine into modern healthcare practices