An Evidence-Based Review of Medicinal Plants for Tuberculosis Management Cited by Avicenna

Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially serious infectious disease and one of the ten leading causes of death worldwide. Even today, available treatments are long and difficult, and TB control is complicated by problems such as inadequate global public health infrastructure, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemics, and the emergence of drug resistance. In spite of various modern treatments, some reasons like total cost, efficacy, safety, and drug resistance have caused a global willingness towards natural remedies. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to focus on medicinal plants mentioned in Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, one of the primary medicinal books. Twenty-eight plants belonging to 22 botanical families have been mentioned for treatment of TB in the Canon. Most of them have a history of use in ethnomedicine and some are used in respiratory products nowadays. Investigating the literature has shown that anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties are the proposed mechanisms for the treatment of some types of TB. Traditional Persian Medicine (TPM) can give new insights for the development of multiple natural treatments, the use of which in human medicine has been tested for thousands of years. By confirming their efficacy and safety, traditional herbal remedies are appropriate adjuvants and complementary to the chemicals mainly used for treating TB as an infectious agent. In 2018, approximately 1.7 billion people (23% of the world’s population) were estimated to have latent TB, about 90 % of which live in developing countries.