**Abstract**

The main purpose of this review is to document medicinal plants used for traditional treatments with their parts, use, ecology, and quality control. Accordingly, 80 medicinal plant species were reviewed; leaves and roots are the main parts of the plants used for preparation of traditional medicines. The local practitioners provided various traditional medications to their patients' diseases such as stomachaches, asthma, dysentery, malaria, evil eyes, cancer, skin diseases, and headaches. The uses of medicinal plants for human and animal treatments are practiced from time immemorial. Stream/riverbanks, cultivated lands, disturbed sites, bushlands, forested areas and their margins, woodlands, grasslands, and home gardens are major habitats of medicinal plants. Generally, medicinal plants used for traditional medicine play a significant role in the healthcare of the majority of the people in Ethiopia. The major threats to medicinal plants are habitat destruction, urbanization, agricultural expansion, investment, road construction, and deforestation. Because of these, medicinal plants are being declined and lost with their habitats. Community- and research-based conservation mechanisms could be an appropriate approach for mitigating the problems pertinent to the loss of medicinal plants and their habitats and for documenting medicinal plants. Chromatography; electrophoretic, macroscopic, and microscopic techniques; and pharmaceutical practice are mainly used for quality control of herbal medicines.

**Keywords:** medicinal plants, herbal medicine, chromatography, histological techniques, pharmaceutical practices, microscopic and macroscopic examination

## **1. Introduction**

Medicinal plants are very vital in their uses for medication, besides providing ecological, economic, and cultural services. The world primary means of treating diseases and fighting infections have been based on the use of medicinal plants. From ancient times, plants have been rich sources of effective and safe medicines [1]. Globally, about 64% of the total world population is reliant on traditional medicine for their healthcare needs [2]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 3.5 billion people in developing countries including Ethiopia believe in the efficiency of plant remedies and use them regularly [3].

Ethiopia is located in the Horn of Africa between 3 and 15° northing, latitude, and 33 and 48° easting, longitude, and is also comprised of nine national regional states and two administrative states with varied agroecological zones. Since the country is characterized by a wide range of ecological, edaphic, and climatic condition, Ethiopia is also very diverse in its flora composition [4]. The flora of Ethiopia is estimated to contain close to 6500–7000 species including medicinal plants; of those, 12–19% are endemic to the country [5]. The medicinal plants have been used for various types of human and animal treatments in the country. According to [6, 7], in Ethiopia, about 80% of human population and 90% of livestock rely on traditional medicine. As also stated by many authors (e.g. [6, 7]), the medicinal plants have shown very effective medicinal values for some diseases of humans and livestock.

Even due to the trust of communities on medicinal values of traditional medicines, culturally associated traditions, and their relatively low cost, medicinal plants are highly demanded in Ethiopia [7]. Inadequate health centers and shortage of medicines and personnel in clinics might be the other reasons for driving the people of Ethiopia, in general, and the low-income community and the rural people, in particular, to the traditional health centers, whereby increasing the demand of medicinal plants.

However, these plants have got little attention regarding the documentation of scientific names, uses, ecology, and conservation in Ethiopia, in particular and world-wise, in general. Moreover, in Ethiopia, traditional medicine is faced with a problem of sustainability and continuity mainly due to the loss of taxa of medicinal plants [8, 9] besides having lack of quality control for herbal medicines. The main causes for the loss and decline of diversity of plants in Ethiopia are human-made factors [10–12]. Habitat destruction and deforestation for commercial timber and forest encroachment for urbanization, investment, agriculture, and other land uses are the major causes of the loss of many thousand hectares of forest that harbor medicinal plants yearly for the past several decades. In addition to these, the medicinal plant materials and associated traditional knowledge are being lost due to the lack of systematic conservation, research, proper utilization, and documentation [13]. The knowledge on identifying and managing the medicinal plants with their parts, use, and ecology is mostly associated with local and elder people, who transmitted their knowledge verbally. Such verbal transmissions of knowledge on medicinal plants have thus resulted in eroding and loss of knowledge and the plant materials as well. The quantity and quality of the safety and efficacy data on traditional medicine are also far from sufficient to meet the criteria needed to support its use worldwide [14]. Therefore, assessing and documenting the medicinal plants along with their useful medicinal parts, use, and ecology in Ethiopia, as well as revising the quality control for herbal materials and medicine, are very crucial for giving priority to their conservation and sustainable utilization.

### **2. Materials and methods**

The materials for this review were published documents. However, regarding the screening of medicinal plants, some medicinal plants not yet identified or available in more than one article being revised during this revision time, and published before 2000 with their uses, were not listed and included for this review analysis so as to increase the quality of the present review, provide the current information to the readers, and restrict the revised papers. Based on this, of the total (32) revised documents, 15 articles, which are assessing the different medicinal plants with their uses and parts, were revised for documenting the medicinal plants for this review.

**91**

*Ethiopian Common Medicinal Plants: Their Parts and Uses in Traditional Medicine - Ecology…*

Additionally, the habitats (ecology) of each medicinal plant were assessed from the Flora Volumes of Ethiopia and Eritrea and [15], besides the articles revised for listing the medicinal plants for this review. The data were analyzed and described quantitatively using frequency, percentage, tables, and figures via applying

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet 2010 and SPSS with version 20, as well as qualitatively

Traditional healers in Ethiopia utilize the herbal resources available in nature for various disease treatments. As reported before, approximately 800 species of the medicinal plants grown in Ethiopia are used for treating about 300 medical conditions [16]. However, based on the present review, the number of medicinal plants and the treatments/medications identified and listed are limited as presented here

As reported by many authors [6, 7, 12, 13, 17–27], there are different types of medicinal plant species with their parts, habitats, and disease types being treated and described here in **Table 1**. Accordingly, as depicted in **Table 1**, there were 80 medicinal plant species with 63 genera, used by the local communities for various human treatments. Among other revised, the common medicinal plants used for treating and curing various diseases are *Aloe* species, *Eucalyptus globulus*, *Hagenia abyssinica*, *Cupressus macrocarpa*, *Buddleja polystachya*, *Acmella caulirhiza*, *Acacia* species, *Citrus* species, *Clematis* species, *Coffee Arabica*, *Croton macrostachyus*,

Based on the review, all plant growth forms were not equally used as remedies, because of the difference in distribution among the growth forms. Accordingly, the life forms of medicinal plants reviewed constituted 18 trees (22.78%), 23 shrubs (29.11), 29 herbs (36.71%), 3 climbers (3.81%), 4 trees/shrubs (5.06%), and 2 herbs/ shrubs (2.53%) (**Figure 1**). Of all life forms, herbs were, thus, the major medicinal plants used by the community for human treatment followed by shrubs and trees.

The review indicated that the plant parts used for medication preparation by the traditional healers are variables. Healers mostly used fresh specimens from commonly available plants [25] to prepare remedies for their patients; this might be mostly due to the effectiveness of fresh medicinal plant parts in treatment since the contents are not lost before use compared to the dried ones [12]. As also referred from many authors, the traditional healers have harvested leaves, roots, barks, seeds, fruits, stems, flowers, barks, seeds, or latex of medicinal plants (**Figure 2**) to prepare their traditional medicines for their patient treatments. As depicted in **Figure 2**, most remedies were prepared from the leaf (32.98%) and root (29.79%) parts of the medicinal plants to treat the diseases compared to the other parts of them. This finding of the review is in line with the findings of the majority of authors' papers (e.g. [18, 25, 27]). The main reason that many traditional medicine practitioners used the leaf parts compared to others for remedial preparation is due to their accessibility and for preventing them from extinction [25]. In fact,

using content analysis, narrating via drawing sub-contents.

**3.1 Medicinal plants and their growth forms and parts used**

*Euphorbia* species, *Ficus sycomorus*, and *Moringa stenopetala* (**Table 1**).

*3.1.2 Medicinal plant parts used for preparation of traditional remedies*

*3.1.1 Composition and growth forms of medicinal plants*

**3. Medicinal plants: their parts, uses, and ecology reviewed**

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86202*

under section by section.

*Ethiopian Common Medicinal Plants: Their Parts and Uses in Traditional Medicine - Ecology… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86202*

Additionally, the habitats (ecology) of each medicinal plant were assessed from the Flora Volumes of Ethiopia and Eritrea and [15], besides the articles revised for listing the medicinal plants for this review. The data were analyzed and described quantitatively using frequency, percentage, tables, and figures via applying Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet 2010 and SPSS with version 20, as well as qualitatively using content analysis, narrating via drawing sub-contents.
