Role of Ethnomedicinal Resources to Cure Metabolic Diseases

The rising incidences and prevalence of metabolic diseases, creating enormous health and economic burden worldwide, are a global healthcare challenge. Such conditions, which can be inherited or acquired, are exemplified by type II diabetes, high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity, etc. and are caused by dysregulated metabolism, i.e. defects in the body’s energy processing system. Increase in mortality and years of healthy life lost due to metabolic diseases calls for urgent attention to manage these diseases. Current treatment options largely involve prolonged allopathic medication which is disadvantageous because of associated adverse health effects. Moreover, these diseases often occur as a constellation of maladies requiring complex treatment regimens with multiple drugs culminating in adverse drug-drug interactions. Therefore, considering the limitations of existing therapeutic options, there is a renewed and growing interest in the use of ethnomedicines for the management of metabolic diseases. Ethnomedicine offers advantage over allopathy or chemical drugs, because these are part of indigenous traditional knowledge system and hence are time-tested, safer, economically affordable, accessible and hence sustainable in the long run. In this chapter, we discuss about ethnomedicines which are used in the treatment and management of diabetes, obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, fatty liver diseases, etc. in various parts of the world. We also discuss about the scientific investigations that have been performed to validate the therapeutic potential of widely used ethnomedicines against metabolic diseases. Finally, clinical trials conducted on ethnomedicinal resources for the cure of metabolic disorders and associated drawbacks will be reported.