From ancient times, medicinal plants have been crucial in sustaining the health & well-being of mankind. Most cultures believed that herbs have magical & medicinal abilities. A 60,000 years old burial site excavated in Iraq, was found to contain eight different medicinal plants. In many cultures such as Hindu, Greek and western believed plants to have a soul and considered and respected as sacred objects.
Our ancestors had a wide range of plants at their disposal and possessed a profound understanding of the healing abilities of plants in their rural communities with over thousand years of the trial & error to observe the effects.
Based on the teachings of our ancestors, ayurvedic products in Sri Lanka use a combination of natural ingredients that have been tried and tested over the years to ensure they are proven to work!
The Egyptian Ebers papyrus of c. 1500 BC is the earliest surviving document which lists dozens of medicinal plants such as garlic & castor oil along with their uses & related spells. In India, Veda text carried information about herbal medicine written around the same period. With the developments in cultures, growing international trade by 200 B.C trade & interest in herbal medicine & spices flourished especially in countries such as China, Egypt & across Europe.
Though European, Indian & Chinese systems differ widely, they all consider that imbalance within the constituent elements of the body is the cause of illness. All these medical traditions believe that working with nature, with the body’s healing capacities, which could be supported & strengthened with appropriate medicinal herbs.
Ayurveda is an ancient system of medicine unique to Sri Lanka & India which stems since 600 BC and aims to improve the quality of health with a holistic approach.
Ayurveda stands for the ‘knowledge on long life’ and has been practiced in Sri Lanka as ‘Hela Veda’ (Sri Lankan medicine) for centuries and currently there are over 25,000 qualified registered medical practitioners in Sri Lanka at local Ayurveda hospitals who are using ayurvedic products for healing.
Ayurvedic products in Sri Lanka contain herbs like turmeric, Tinospora and bee honey which have been used for different ailments over 4000 years and currently a range of herbs are been successfully used in modern formats like capsules and creams to create a fit with a modern busy lifestyle without need of preparing the herb from scratch to be used as a medicine.
The popularity of Sri Lankan Ayurvedic products is growing with Ceylon spas , Sri Lankan ayurvedic doctors who are successfully practicing around the world and a lot of foreign visitors yielding excellent results from ayurvedic and herbal products.
In traditional Chinese medicine, qi is the primal energy that maintains life & health. In Ayurveda, it is prana. In the western tradition, Hippocrates writes about “vis medicatrix naturae”
Due to availability of number of constituents in a herb , herbs are been combined with each other for a synergistic effect that ensures one herb can enhance the effect of another at the same time which ensures a better performing product solution.
Major pharmaceutical companies have invested vast resources into screening the active constituents of medicinal plants from the whole world. The drug taxol, extracted from the Pacific Yew (Taxus brevifolia) one of the most effective treatments for breast cancer was developed this way.
Herbal medicines in Sri Lanka are formulated using a range of botanicals with unique medicinal properties based on centuries-old ayurvedic and herbal formulations to effectively nourish and protect your body & soul!
Egyptian Ebers papyrus of c. 1500 BC lists dozen of medicinal plants