Traditional Approaches towards Standardization of Herbal Medicines -A Review

Herbal drug technology is used for converting botanical materials into medicines, where standardization and quality control with proper integration of modern scientific techniques and traditional knowledge is important. Herbal medicines are gaining more and more attention all over the world, due to their long historical clinical practice and less side effects. This paper reviewed the traditional methods in the quality control of herbal medicines, including, the traditionalchromatographic methods and comprehensive methods, such as fingerprint and multi-component quantification are emphasized; hyphenated techniques, like HPLC-MS, GC-MS. In a few word, the analysis and quality control of herbal medicines are moving towards an integrative and comprehensive direction, in order to better address the inherent holistic nature of herbal medicines.