Abstract

EVALUATION OF ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY AND DETERMINATION OF SUITABLE METHOD FOR ANTIBIOGRAM OF SOME COMMERCIAL HOMEOPATHIC DRUGS

Foysal Hossen, Otun Saha, Sanjoy Kumar Mukharjee*, Md. Imdadul Huque Khan,
Mohammad Ruhul Amin and Mohammad Mehadi Hassan Chowdhury

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of homeopathic drug against pathogenic organisms as well as to determine the most suitable methods for evaluating the antimicrobial activity of homeopathic drug. Four common homeopathic drugs which are available in Bangladesh were used in this study as an alternative medicine against various diseases like cholera, typhoid, diarrhea as well as gastrointestinal tract infection. For each drug sample both undiluted and diluted form of drug have been used simultaneously. Four methods (disc diffusion, agar well dilution, turbidimetric and drug inoculation into media) were used to test four common homeopathic drugs for screening antimicrobial activity and find out the inhibitory concentration of drugs. Microorganisms used in this study were clinically isolated Salmonella sp., Vibrio sp. and Escherichia coli. Among those four testing methods only medium inoculation method showed positive result of susceptibility (300μl/ml) therefore indicates its potentiality to test the homeopathic drugs for antimicrobial activity. In case of minimum inhibitory concentration values of the undiluted form of drugs showed that they are also active even in least concentrations ranged from 5 μl/ ml to 200 μl /ml but in the case of diluted drugs the range was from 5 μl/ ml to 149 μl /ml. This study has revealed that selected homeopathic drugs have some therapeutic values. Further broad range investigation could lead us to use these drugs as strong medicine in future.

Keywords: Homeopathic drugs, Therapeutic values, Pathogenic organisms, Disc diffusion, Antimicrobial activity.