R&D STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADITIONAL HERBAL MEDICINAL PRODUCTS

Plants, animals, and humans in nature are products of balance. Plants are both the main food source and the first medicine of humans. Since ancient times, people have been interested in the plants around them in almost every part of the world, trying to learn which plants can be nutrients, which ones are beneficial, and which ones are harmful, instinctively or by trial and error. Today, this information has been filtered through science, and the safe use of plants used in traditional medicine as herbal medicinal products has begun to be proven. Anatolia has sufficient manpower, knowledge, and technology to produce herbal products starting from the field, develop new products and present them to the market. It makes this process sustainable by not losing its biological richness and by ensuring that the people are educated in a way that will improve their awareness of conservation. Herbal preparations are obtained by subjecting herbal substances to treatments such as extraction, distillation, expression, fractionation, purification, concentration, or fermentation. These include comminuted or powdered herbal substances, tinctures, extracts, essential oils, expressed juices, and processed exudates. Therefore, products containing herbal preparations as active ingredients are referred to as “traditional herbal medicinal products” in Turkey. Especially in Traditional and Complementary Medicine Practices, the consumption of these herbal products by society is quite common. Considering consumer and human health, consumer rights, and the protection of the environment; The quality, efficacy, and safety assessment of the plants used in the herbal preparations obtained from them will be made. To obtain quality and standardized products and to increase the market opportunities for medicinal/aromatic plants, it is necessary to develop improved plant species, to determine the appropriate environmental conditions in which these plants will grow, to grow plants by good agricultural practices, to collect and store at the right time. The plants and herbal products to be produced must be of Pharmacopoeia quality and at world standards. Therefore, information on the procedures and principles regarding the applications within this scope will also be given. Besides, detailed scientific data will be presented regarding risk assessments.