Improving Certainty in Employment of Medicinal Plants of Traditional Medicine by Determination of Their Scientific Names

Performing any laboratory study and evaluation on medicinal plants of traditional medicinerelies on documented information of medicinal plants with definite scientific names. Thus,here we address the issue of scientific names to make traditional medicine closer to themodern medicine. To remove any potential ambiguity, we prepared a list of plants that there is a consensus about their scientific name. To this end, first we drew up a list of ancient Iranian and non-Iranian medicinal plants with their scientific names. Then, we added the names of medicinal plants on the market as well as the common Iranian plants. The primary list consisted of the scientific names of 2962 medicinal plants. The names then were critically reviewed and compared with scientific descriptions of reliable textbooks such as "Makhzan al-Adwiya" and "Al-Seidene" by Al-Biruni. After that, we selected the plants with a good agreement between their scientific names on the one hand, and their traditional name and description in ancient books, on the other hand. Consequently, we prepared a list of almost 700 species of medicinal plants (400 traditional medicinal plants) with definitescientific names.