Strategies to Evaluate the Quality of Herbal Products with Special Emphasis on Toxicity, Chemical Profiling, and Pharmacokinetics

Since human beings have been on this planet, herbal drugs have been used. Therefore, one could say they are virtually as old as life itself. The use of herbs as medicine is the oldest form of healthcare and has been practiced in all cultures throughout history. The reasons behind the popularity of herbal medicine are its effective and curative nature for different chronic diseases and lower levels of toxicity. For the last two centuries, plant-based medicines largely dominated in medical practice. However, between the years 1950 and 1970, various synthetic drugs and antibiotics were discovered, leading to a decline in the use of herbal medicine (Aminov, 2010, Jain et al., 2022).