Future Medicines in Danger

There are a number of reasons for increasing interest in complementary and alternative medicine and herbal medicine. And one of those reasons is the realization that many of the pharmaceutical agents that we rely on have a basis and origin in nature.

However, I didn't know the following statistic until this morning: more than half of all prescription drugs were developed from chemicals that were first identified in wild plants.

It's not just speculation, but fact that there are future medicines "out there" still, just waiting to be discovered and utilized. This was actually the premise of a 1992 movie featuring two of my favorite actors, Sean Connery and Lorraine Braccho (later of Sopranos fame). The movie was Medicine Man and its focus was the destruction of the rain forest for short-sighted agricultural purposes (short-sighted because this type of land is not suited to farming and gives out quickly).

And with all this in mind, here's a link to an article titled:

Medical plants 'face extinction'