Echinacea

Preparations with echinacea, made by Dr. Müller Pharma, contain extracts of the plant Echinacea purpurea, which is used in a traditional people's medicine in various parts of the world. This plant is also known as Rudbeckia purpurea, or purple coneflower. It was used by North American Indians, who called it "The Sun hat", as a traditional curative plant, as early as two hundred years ago. They chewed its root when they had pains, used its leaves and sap when their wounds or inflammations would heal bad, or used it after snake bites. Modern medicine in Europe and North America started to use this plant at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the USA Echinacea was inscribed in the National registry of Drug in 1926. In Europe the biggest attention was paid to its practical and research aspects in the 2nd half of the 20th century, mainly in Germany, where it became one of the most used curative plants. Essential oils, fatty acids, phenolic substances and polysaccharides that can be obtained from this plant, are able to increase immunity in a nonspecific way and have bacteriostatic actions.