Phytotherapy (sometimes improperly called Phytomedicine) is, in general, human therapeutic practice that is common to all cultures and peoples since prehistoric times, which includes the use of plants or plant extracts to cure diseases or to maintain the well-being. Given the antiquity of this practice, which most likely represents the first example of human therapeutic practice, and because of its widespread geographic distribution, it is not possible to describe it in terms of a specific therapeutic (such as you can do to homeopathy).
Rather it makes sense to say that the therapeutic use of plants is found in all human therapeutic systems, from the most ancient and based on observation and empiricism to the more sophisticated, with high levels of complexity theory to the modern biomedicine.
From the standpoint of terminology, confining itself to the European Union, only a few years, and only to Britain, there is a professional group of institutionalized phytotherapists with university training program separate from that provided for biomedicine, and legal protection of the name. In other states EU phytotherapist the term has no legal value, and herbal medicine is not a recognized branch of biomedicine. The term comes from the greek phyton (plant) and therapeia (care).
The herbal medicine is considered alternative or complementary medicine in most EU member states and the United States, although some plants and especially some fraction of the plant are also recognized and used by scientific medicine traditional. Folk medicine uses of these substances since time immemorial. Hippocrates mentioned the remedy as the third instrument of touch and physician next to the word.
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