The efficacy of herbal medicines in clinical models: the case of jambolan.

A large proportion of drugs employed in clinical practice come from plants. The development of new medical agents is a lengthy and time-consuming process, with the identification of extracts with putative therapeutic effects, the isolation of active ingredients and pre-clinical studies to investigate their pharmacological profile. We propose a shortcut in this sequence of procedures, testing first if the extracts, in the way they are used by patients, have efficacy in clinical models.