DENDROBIUM MACRAEI LINDL.: A REVIEW ON MEDICINALLY POTENT ORCHID ON THE BASIS OF RECENT EVIDENCES

Abstract

Context: Orchids are well known not only for their ornamental value, but also, they are used in herbal medicine. They showed the presence of majority of phytochemicals such as alkaloids, flavonoids, glycosides which have made orchids valuable as medicine. From an Ayurvedic perspective, Dendrobium macraei is a crucial orchid as it is said to be the source of Jivanti. The plant has a sweet flavor, is cooling, alterative, astringent to the bowels, tonic, aphrodisiac, and expectorant. These properties make it useful for treating conditions such as asthma, bronchitis, "tridosha," throat problems, fevers, burning sensations, biliousness, and diseases of the eye and blood.

Evidence Acquisition: Various articles from numerous databases were studied exhaustively and during this process several articles and manuscripts were discarded too on the basis of insufficient data availability about the species of Dendrobium macraeiwhich is required for the creation of this manuscript.

Results: Orchids are well known not only for their ornamental value, but also, they are used in herbal medicine. The species are rarely used for several kind of activities. Further studies are necessary to scientifically evaluate the traditional uses of this plant through extraction and identification of their active ingredients and the mechanisms and mode of action that would serve as a source of collective information on this plant from future perspectives.

Conclusions: Dendrobium macraeiappears to be a promising candidate for improving memory, and as free radical scavenger due to the existence of phyto constituents like phenolic compounds and flavonoids.Nevertheless, further studies are needed to explore the full potential of D. macraei in various diseases on the basis of traditional uses regarding evidence found in the literature survey.