Traditional pharmaceutical recipes from a metabolomics perspective: Interviews with traditional healers in Mali and comparison with modern herbal medicines

Abstract

Scientific data on traditional pharmaceutical recipes are largely missing in the literature, despite the relevance of this information within the process of herbal medicine preparation; the chemistry of the finished product in fact, can be dramatically affected by the recipes adopted. A fieldwork on the topic of traditional pharmaceutical recipes was performed in Mali; traditional and modern practices to prepare herbal medicines were compared. The nascent scientific discipline named metabolomics identify a new paradigm in natural product chemistry. Under the umbrella of metabolomics, the traditional practices recorded during the field survey in Mali were interpreted from a biochemical perspective and presented in this paper.

Keywords: Medicinal plants, herbal medicines, traditional healer, ethnopharmacy, ethnochemistry, inter-kingdom communication.