A preliminary report on ethnomedicinal uses of different plants for oral care in Kalahandi district, Odisha

Abstract

There is a long history of the use of plants to improve dental health and promote oral hygiene and is still commonly practiced among Indian communities. Pencil sized sticks are used from certain plant parts and are chewed on one end until they become soft into a brush and the brush end is used to clean the teeth in a similar manner to the toothbrush. The plant parts when used in these manners are commonly referred as the "chewing stick" or "Tooth stick". So, to describe the different uses of different plant parts in dental care, an ethnobotanical study was conducted from October 2019 to March 2020 to investigate the use of different plant species for dental care (tooth ache, tooth decay, pyorrhea, foul smell and as tooth brush). These plant species are arranged alphabetically with their local names, botanical names, family and followed by the method of uses for dental care. In this present paper we had reported about 49 species of medicinal plants belong to 42 genus and 29 families.