Jadhav Priyanka M and Kshirsagar Nilima A
Traditional medicines form the integral part of the health care system for the developing countries serving around 80% of the world population and are widely used as over the counter medication. There is urgent need to classify the traditional medicines to facilitate utilization data, safety and efficacy data, quality control measures and provide new avenues for further drug research. Medical texts of Ayurveda have classified the herbs as per their therapeutic indication, but these texts are in Sanskrit or in regional language. This makes it difficult for researchers all over world to access, understand and interpret information. We here propose to adapt the traditional classification to WHO-HATC (World Health Organization: Herbal Anatomical-Therapeutic-Chemical Classification) method to facilitate the classification in Scientific names in a standardized uniform way and further understanding of the utility of herbs in different therapeutic areas. Thus this innovative approach of classification can serve as one stop source of all recent updated information on the herbal drug research for the academia and industry both. This classification can be used in a pragmatic, transparent, hierarchical way in a computerized system to capture and use information of various degrees of precision.