How to use EXTRACT

You can access the free summaries at anytime for free. Once you have a password you can explore the database itself in many different ways.

EXTRACT is purpose-built on a relational database structure. This allows us to link data from many tables. It allows cross-referencing between data of the following types:

• evidence of benefit from clinical trials and laboratory research;
• evidence of risk from adverse drug reports and clinical research papers;
• a unique distillation of traditional use/ethnobotanical data from around the world;
• similar pharmacological and toxicological data on plant constituents.

By following relational links one can then link the information about any plant in the database to

• other plants sharing the same prominent constituents

• plants that are taxonomically related.

Potential interactions with synthetic medicines can be searched by both the plant and by generic drug name.

To help make more sense of the diversity of medicinal plants EXTRACT has a unique navigational tool.

Most medicinal plant research focuses on the bewildering arrays of chemical constituents. This merely illustrates the variable complexity of whole plant content and points to poor consistency in the delivery of reliable pharmacological effects by non-standardized herbal remedies.

However many constituents can be classified into phytochemical groups with many consistent and predictable pharmacological properties. These groups are the common currency, the lingua franca, the Rosetta Stone’ of the EXTRACT database. They can link the activity of the plants that contain them.

Papers cited in the database are ranked by their relevance to decisions about clinical use, with highest scores for well-designed systematic reviews and lowest scores for in vitro laboratory studies and to incidental reports on traditional use. For more about the grading system used for evidence in the database go here.