The pharmacological evaluation of natural products--general and specific approaches to screening ethnopharmaceuticals.

Natural product research is most efficiently conducted in a systematic fashion concentrating on ten critical questions which must be answered in sequential fashion by thoroughly trained professionals experienced in such research. The minimum ethnopharmacology research team should consist of a botanist, a chemist and a pharmacologist with each carrying the responsibility for answering certain of the critical questions. The screening procedures used for the evaluation of synthetic medicinals generally are not appropriate for guiding the extraction of active principles from crude drugs and establishing extraction efficiency; therefore, specialized techniques unique to ethnopharmacology must be used.