Research Journal of Pharmacy and Technology

Even though modern medicinal system is well developed and easily accessible, the rural people still continues to depend upon traditional medicinal system for curing various ailments. Several cases of fast recovery and many cases of death due to wrong treatment was observed during the year 2018-19 in rural villages of Nagaon district of Assam, India. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of some medicinal plants and their formulations used by traditional healer for treatment of gastrointestinal disorders. The information was collected by interaction with the traditional healers and altogether 14 plant species were documented for preparation of six different formulations. Antibacterial evaluation against E. coli, P. aeruginosa and S. aureus revealed that formulation prepared from freshly prepared plant materials showed better efficacy than formulations obtained from traditional healers. Again, organic solvents extracts showed greater antibacterial activity than the aqueous extracts. Amongst the solvents, the polar organic solvent methanol showed greater inhibitory effect as compared to other non polar organic solvents, ethanol and hexane. GC-MS analysis of the potent plant extracts showed presence of several bioactive compounds like tumerone, curlone, hexadecanoic acid, oleic acid, eicosanoic acid, erucic acid and isopimaric acid which have earlier reports of having significant antibacterial activities.