The Herbal Cure For Epilepsy: An Overview

Abstract

Plants have been used to cure epileptic seizures, since ancient times. Approximately 70 percent people living in developing countries still rely on complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) regardless of the improvement in conventional medicine. People, particularly living in rural and tribal areas, have faith in Hakeem’s. According to them, alternative treatments do not have toxic effects and are more easily accessible, cost effective and have been used traditionally. Standard drugs therapies have several adverse effects; people become resistant and require a combination of treatments which may double the risk of adverse effects. Herbal agents could be a better alternative to conventional medicine; hence to prove the effectiveness and safety of medicinal plants, evidences-based researches are required from different parts of world. In order to prove the efficacy of herbal agents, different animal models of seizures are used to evaluate efficacy of plants and among all of them Maximum electroshock (MES) induced seizure model (a model of tonic-colonic seizure), is used as gate keeper to assess the anti-seizure efficacy of newly tested plants. Key Words: Ant seizure efficacy, epilepsy, herbal cure, alternative medicines.