Abstract

Common cold is a very prevalent disease with cough, rhinorrhea, stuffy nose, and sore throat as the most common symptoms. Other symptoms include myalgia, fatigue, headache, and dyspepsia. Nowadays, there is no specific treatment to common cold but some ethnopharmacoligical and ethnobotanical studies have been done to investigate different therapies used to relieve disease symptoms. The present study was conducted to identify the medicinal plants used to treat common cold in Shiraz. The traditional therapeutic data in this study were gathered between July, 2015 and September, 2015 by the questionnaires distributed among the groceries across Shiraz. The findings of this study indicated that 22 medicinal plants are used to treat common cold in Shiraz. Some of the plants presented in this study such as Althea aucheri Boiss., Adonis aestivalis L., and Amygdalus scoparia Spach. are native to Shiraz region, and have been used to treat common cold for the first time in Iran traditional medicine. These plants may be used to produce effective natural drugs on common cold if complementary studies are conducted on them.