Herbalism is a traditional medicinal or folk medicine practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts. Herbs/plants, the major component of traditional materia medica in the world, are of the main forms of life on earth. It is estimated that there are about 350,000 species of existing plants (including seed plants, bryophytes, and ferns), among which 287,655 species have been identified as of 2004. Herbal medicine (HM), also called botanical medicine, phytomedicine, or phytotherapy, refers to herbs, herbal materials, herbal preparations, and finished herbal products that contain parts of plants or other materials as active ingredients

The plant parts used in herbal therapy include seeds, berries, roots, leaves, fruits, bark, flowers, or even the whole plants. Man was mainly dependent on crude botanical material for medical needs to retain vitality and cure diseases  prior to the introduction of aspirin derived from Spiraea ulmaria which was already prescribed for fever and swelling in Egyptian papyri and recommended by the Greek Hippocrates for pain and fever.

Although written records about medicinal plants dated back at least 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who described well-established medicinal uses for such plants as laurel, caraway, and thyme, archeological studies have shown that the practice of herbal medicine dates as far back as 60,000 years ago in Iraq and 8,000 years ago in China. With the advent of western medicine (or “conventional” medicine) over the past century, herbal medicine has been challenged by practitioners of mainstream medicine because of the lack of scientific evidence in the context of contemporary medicine, despite its long history of effective use.