Tribal ethnomedicine: a rich source for future drugs

The tribes are distributed across geographically different places with distinct environmental features, and many of these people still follow a traditional lifestyle with little or no contact with western diet. As a result, it can be predicted that their gut should be unadulterated. Traditional tribal knowledge of medicinal plants is an excellent resource for discovering bioactive compounds with therapeutic potential in phytochemical research. Not only do indigenous people use available flora for treating clinical conditions, they also consume those as pre and probiotics, which directly affect their gut microbiome. Tribes have established their own systems throughout the world. Tribals in India continue to utilise ancient traditional health care methods, including locally available plants. Traditional medical knowledge is vanishing as a result of urbanisation and migration. The forest is a rich resource of diversified ethno-botanical wealth, so that comprehensive research is required for proper documentation including ethnomedicinal knowledge of local tribes. Individuals were interviewed using pretested semi-structured questionnaires like the local name, scientific name, family, usable parts, and ethnomedicinal usage among others. Documentation of tribal people's local plant applications would aid in the long-term use of indigenous medicinal practices, and additional information will be useful for pharmacological research and the isolation of novel phytoconstituents. As a result, knowledge of illness and diseases would lead towards the requirement of local traditional or biomedical healing. Thus, there is a need to formulate a comprehensive database based on ethnomedicinal practices across healthy as well as diseased individuals in near future.