Review on medicinal plants used in snake bites

Abstract

Snakebite is a very common problem worldwide. Sri Lanka also has one of the highest rates of snakebite incidence. The annual incidence of snake bites in Sri Lanka is 400 per 100,000 people corresponding to 80,000 snake bites in a 2 million people population. Sri Lankan traditional medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and traditional medicinal systems of other countries have great treatment and management modalities for snake bites. Natural herbs are used to cure snake bites in these medicinal systems. This review discusses medicinal plants which help to cure snakebites. For this review, only the research articles published in the span of the last 15 years (2005 to 2020) with regard to medicinal plants used to treat snake bites are used as references. Data was gathered from websites like google scholar, pub med, science direct, and sci-hub. Then all medicinal plants used to treat snakebites in Sri Lanka which were mentioned in referred research articles were listed. A total of 386 medicinal plants which can be used to treat snakebites were found in this review. These medicinal plants belong to 114 plant families. The highest number of medicinal plants which can cure snakebites were found to belong in the family Fabaceae (41 plants).