review · Plants
Traditional medicine for treating both humans and animals is deeply rooted in Kenyan Maasai culture, with indigenous knowledge transferred across generations. A comprehensive review drawing on journals, books, and postgraduate dissertations has established a consolidated inventory of medicinal plant diversity across the community. The investigation identified 289 plant species utilised for healthcare. Plant species from the Leguminosae, Asteraceae, Malvaceae, Euphorbiaceae, and Lamiaceae families feature most prominently. These medicinal plants are predominantly applied to address gastrointestinal complaints and respiratory system disorders. Preparation typically involves boiling plant material into decoctions for oral ingestion. Roots represent the preferred botanical part for remedies, raising environmental concerns because harvesting roots directly challenges sustainable plant use and threatens the future availability of these vital species.
Preserving indigenous botanical knowledge is critical both for cultural heritage and for modern medical innovation. Consolidating dispersed records into a single dataset provides a foundation for identifying plant-based therapies while highlighting conservation risks. Recognising that root harvesting threatens local biodiversity allows conservationists and communities to develop sustainable harvesting practices before valuable medicinal plant species disappear.
The documented plant inventory serves as an early-stage bioprospecting resource for pharmaceutical and veterinary researchers seeking candidate compounds to address gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments. Because the findings represent ethnobotanical documentation rather than laboratory validation, real-world product development remains at an early stage. Any commercial drug discovery or natural product programmes would require extensive phytochemical screening, efficacy testing, and the establishment of sustainable cultivation strategies to avoid depleting wild root stocks.
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The use of medicinal plants for treatment of humans and animals is entrenched in the Maasai culture and traditional knowledge related to it is passed on from one generation to the next. A handful of researchers have in the past decades documented this knowledge. No single study has documented medicinal plant uses of the Maasai community as a whole. This review provides a consolidated database of the diversity and uses of medicinal plants among the Maasai in Kenya. The study will help conserve traditional medicinal plant knowledge that is valuable for the development of modern medicine. Relevant information on medicinal plants used by the Maasai of Kenya was extracted from journals, books, M.Sc., and Ph.D. dissertations. We found evidence of 289 plant species used by the Maasai of Kenya in traditional medicine. Most species were used to treat health conditions in the categories <i>gastrointestinal</i> and <i>respiratory system disorders</i>. The most used families were Leguminosae, Asteraceae, Malvaceae, Euphorbiaceae, and Lamiaceae. Medicines were commonly prepared as a decoction and administered through oral ingestion, with roots reported to be the preferred plant part for medication. The Maasai preference for roots compared to other plant parts may be unsustainable and could threaten species availability in the future.
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DOI: 10.3390/plants9010044
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