Diarrhea is a serious problem affecting 3-5 billion people per year around the world, especially children of below 5 years. 70% of the world population uses traditional and indigenous medicine for their primary health care. The facts of these indigenous remedies are passed verbally and sometimes as documents. Since ancient time, Ayurveda is the main system of healing in South East Asian countries. Indian literature from ayurvedic texts and other books claim the potency of several plants in the treatment of diarrhea. As the global prospective of ayurvedic medicine is increasing, interest regarding the scientific basis of their action is parallely increasing. Researchers are doing experiments to establish the relation between the claimed action and observed pharmacological activities. In the present article, an attempt was made to compile the scientific basis of medicinal plants used to cure diarrhea in Ayurveda. Literature was collected via electronic search (PubMed, ScienceDirect, Medline, and Google Scholar) from published articles that reports antidiarrheal activity of plants that were mentioned in Ayurveda classics. A total of 109 plant species belonging to 58 families were reported for their antidiarrheal activity. Several Indian medicinal plants have demonstrated promising antidiarrheal effects, but the studies on the antidiarrheal potentials of these plants are not taken beyond proof of concept stage. It is hoped that the article would stimulate future clinical studies because of the paucity of knowledge in this area.
Keywords: Ayurveda; diarrhea; medicinal plant; traditional medicine.