The Miracle on the Mountains: Crocus: the Antimicrobial and Antioxidant Effects of Crude Extracts of Crocus Genus in Turkey

Since ancient times, plants have been used as medicine. Because of the fact that synthetic drugs have provide insufficient in treatment of certain diseases in recent years and that some side-effects of these drugs have been discovered, the need to use natural products has increased. Especially for the last twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of medical and aromatic plants in medicine and other related industries. Today, many drugs sold in drugstores either contain plants in their origin or they are the synthesized versions of plant-originated compounds. The fact that synthetic drugs have undesirable side effects has led people to use natural medicine again. Another superiority of natural drugs is that they possess more than one effect. However, synthetic drugs have only effect. As a result, more and more researchers are being carried out in order to find new natural medicine raw materials. As in other countries, in Turkey many plants which have proved useful via trial and error method are used as medicine. In this sense, we can say that there are still many plants in our country which have not been researched yet.