Ayur-Sudha’s Research

Introduction
The Institute is taking steps to strengthen its research activities, working alongside the physicians at the AYUR SUDHA . Some of the activities are elaborated below

Comprehensive Electronic Medicinal Plant Catalogue
Medicinal plant extracts form the basis of Ayurveda medicine and treatment.

AYUR SUDHA  in conjunction with the Ayurvedic Universities & Many Research centres , Department of Botany initiated the preparation of a searchable electronic data base and a Medicinal Plant Web site which would contain details of  THE MEDICINAL PLANTS IN INDIA which are most commonly used in Ayurveda medicine.

The list consists of around 1635 plants, and the steps in preparing the web involved the following tasks:

1. MAKING A LIST OF MEDICINAL PLANTS
Choosing the most commonly used medicinal plants of India and finding their scientific names, the families they belong to, and their common English names along with their Sinhala names from various books and databases. Finding the English names was a very time consuming task as most plants did not have English names designated to them or, they were not readily available in the standard texts. This will be an on-going project for a considerable time. The list of plants was arranged in alphabetical order according to their family names.

2. GIVING MEDICINAL PLANTS A ‘STATUS’
Next step was to give these plants a “status” (ie, endemic, native, naturalised exotic, only under cultivation] for each species. For this purpose, the information on flowering plants in India had to be checked with great care.

3. CHECKING THE EDIBLE NATURE OF PLANTS
On completion of the above, we checked on the edible nature [or species with edible parts] of each species of these medicinal plants. As there is no written literature to get this information