Phytotherapy means "plant treatment." It is the oldest form of medicine and you may be surprised to learn that, when considered from a global perspective, it is still the most commonly used type of medicine in the world today. Many of the earliest surviving written texts including the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus and several ancient Chinese documents are essentially lists of herbs with their medicinal uses.

The great names in the medicine of antiquity such as Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Avicenna and Galen were all herbalists. It tends to be forgotten that the materia medica of conventional medicine was, until as late as the 1930s, largely plant-based and that botany was still part of the undergraduate curriculum in some medical schools until the mid twentieth century.

Although today classed as a form of complementary medicine, herbal medicine is in fact, when viewed globally and historically, the most conventional of all types of medicine!