Philippines Herbal Plants Providing Natural Health and Vitality

Philippines herbal plants at the Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care Herbal Plant (PITAHC) in Tacloban City, Leyte, are used to manufacture a wide variety of Philippine herbal products.

Imagine walking through 22 hectares of lagundi, sambong, tsaang dagat and other herbal plants and learning about their medicinal values. Better still, help harvest the good leaves to be used in the manufacturing of herbal tablets, herbal teas, or herbal soaps.

You can walk through the different processes before herbal tablets are made, from the washing of the good leaves to air drying to baking and making the granules, up to the packaging and packing them into boxes.

Then you can go to the Plant's tea house and see how various herbal teas are bagged, and then sit comfortably while sipping a delicious and soothing concoction of ampalaya, niyog-niyogan or ulasimang bato.

Don't forget to wash your hands with herbal soap which are also manufactured with Philippines herbal plants, the Akapulko Soap, Bayabas Soap, Calamansi Soap, Carrot Soap, Cucumber Soap, Kamias Soap, Labanos Soap and Papaya Soap.

Away from the maddening crowd, so they say, the Herbal Plant, with a little add-on here and there, can truly be a medical hideaway.

The PITAHC Herbal Plant in Eastern Visayas is located on 36 hectares of rolling hills at Barangay Bagacay in Tacloban City. Called the Tacloban Herbal Pharmaceutical Processing and Manufacturing Plant, it is one of the four Philippines herbal plants operated by the Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care. The other plants are in Cagayan Valley, Davao and Cotabato.

Now able to produce 180,000 tablets per day, the plant intends to manufacture lagundi, sambong, tsaang gubat, yerba Buena, akapulko, ampalaya, ulasimang bato tablets and garlic capsules.

The plant facilities consist of buildings, machinery and equipment for drying and processing of raw materials, dosage manufacturing, quality control, animal production and Bioassay for animal pharmacological and toxicological studies. The plant has a twenty-two (22) hectare land area, eleven (11) hectares of which is planted in the first batch of the five (5) priority plants to supply the facility with raw materials.

The personnel are all local recruits who have been given special training in their respective technical jobs related to Philippines herbal plants.

The Tacloban Herbal Pharmaceutical Processing and Manufacturing Plant is truly a major milestone in the Philippine government efforts toward self-reliance and basic pharmaceutical production from indigenous materials, a good medical tourism destination.