Exercise 10. Read about constituents and drug synergysm

Exercise 9. True or False Statements.

1. As late as the beginning of the 20th century, the subject of the pharmacognosy had developed mainly on the botanical side, being particularly concerned with the description and identification of drugs both in their whole state and in powder form.

2. The most pharmacognostic studies focus on medicines derived from artificial sources.

3. The fields of the pharmacognosy are medical ethnobotany, psychopharmacology, phytotherapy, phytochemistry, zoopharmacognosy, marine pharmacognosy.

4. Phytochemistry studies chemicals derived from plants (including the identification of new drug candidates derived from plant sources).

5. In 2008 the latest figures available for Africa, the total OTC market for herbal medicinal products reached a figure of $11 billion, with consumption for Germany of $4.5 billion, France $3.6 billion and Italy $900 million.

One characteristic of crude drug material is that constituents may have an opposite, moderating or enhancing effect. Hence, the final effect of any crude drug material will be a product of the interactions between the constituents and the effect of each constituent on its own. To effectively study the existence and affect of such interactions, scientific studies must examine the effect that multiple constituents, given concurrently, have on the system. Herbalists assert that as phytopharmaceuticals rely upon synergy for their activities, plants with high levels of active constituents like ginsenosides or hypericin may not correlate with the strength of the herbs. In phytopharmaceutical or herbal medicine, the therapeutic effects of herbs cannot be determined unless its active ingredient or cofactors are identified or the herb is administered as a whole. One way to indicate strength is standardization to one or several marker compounds that are believed to be mainly responsible for the biological effects. However many herbalists believe that the active ingredient in a plant is the plant itself.

TEXTs FOR WRITTEN TRANSLATION

Дата добавления: 2014-11-18