In traditional medicine, plants are very important for the development of primary health care medicine mainly due to their ability to synthesise secondary metabolites with extraordinary therapeutic potentials against various diseases. The World Health Organisation estimates more than 80% of the world’s population relies on plant-based remedies used as traditional medicine (Ekor, 2014, Mukherjee, 2002, Bandaranayake, 2006). The traditional medicines from plants origin are often easily accessible and cheaper with fewer side effects as compared to the synthetic alternate drugs. A lot of medicinal plants have been evaluated leading to the discovery of many promising compounds used in the formulation of new drugs or modifying the available drugs (Eruygur et al., 2019, Gao et al., 2022, Tourchi et al., 2016).

It has been corroborated that the medicines from herbal origin are capable to ameliorate intestinal injury (Huang et al., 2021, Huang et al., 2023) and regulate the intestinal immune system (Lu et al., 2020, Wang et al., 2022). Various herbal medicines reduce heat, detoxify chemicals, reduce pain and swelling, stimulate blood circulation, and are used to cure hepatitis and urinary tract inflammation (Lu et al., 2020).

Among the plant families for herbal medicine, Asteraceae (formerly known as Compositae) is one of the most diverse and significant families having almost ∼1 911 genera and ∼32 913 accepted species and 13 subfamilies (Panda et al., 2019). Since the old times, the consumption of herbs of the Asteraceae family as food and as medicine has continued (Mohanta et al., 2023). Some of the Asteraceae plants have been cultivated for more than 3 000 years as food and medicine. The Asteraceae plants are distributed throughout the world but are most frequently distributed in subtropical areas including arid and semiarid regions (Bohm and Stuessy, 2001).

A lot of Asteraceae plants bear pharmacological potentials such as antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antidiabetic, hepatoprotective, and antiparasitic activities due to the presence of oils, polyphenolic compounds, lignans, saponins, phenolic acids, polysaccharides, sterols, and terpenoids etc. (Koc et al., 2015; Rolink and Olas, 2021). The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the Artemisia genus from Asteraceae for the discovery of artemisinin, which has effective results against malaria (Daddy et al., 2017, Hussain et al., 2017, Panda and Luyten, 2018, da Silva et al., 2023).

Pakistan is rich in medicinal and aromatic plant species due to its diverse climate, habitat, and soil types. According to an estimate, almost 6 000 wild plant species (Ali, 2008) are present with nearly 600 species being used for medicinal purposes. About 80% of these medicinal plants are distributed naturally in the Northwestern and Northeastern regions of Pakistan (Ijaz et al., 2015, Ali and Qaiser, 2009).

More than 300 medicinal plants are traded in Pakistan, and about 12% of the flora is taken as traditional medicine (Shinwari and Nasim, 2016) and the uses of medicinal plants have become a crucial aspect of their cultural heritage (Hussain et al., 2012b, Hussain et al., 2012a). The top 10 herbal manufacturers (Dawakhana) in Pakistan consume about 2 million kg of 200 medicinal plants annually. Few medicinal plants in the Unani system are thought to have originated from the medicine of ancient Greece (Shinwari and Nasim, 2016). In the early 1950s, 84% Pakistani population was using indigenous medicinal plants as primary health care, which is now restricted to some remote areas due to the rapid change in lifestyle (Bano et al., 2014a). In 1983, this percentage declined to 63% where people in some villages were reported to use plants as medicines (Ahmad and Habib, 2014). The medicinal plants used in Pakistan are very vast, but their rapid documentation is essential to avoid the loss of essential ethnobotanical knowledge of specific plants (Hostettmann et al., 2000). According to Shinwari and Gilani (2003), nearly 60 000 local healers and practitioners in the rural and distant regions of Pakistan use more than 200 different plant species as primary health care remedies against health problems.

Currently, the traditional medicine system in Pakistan faces a number of challenges, such as the lack of information about market demand and the lack of regulatory bodies like the Traditional Medicines Act, strategies, policies, decreasing resources, action plans, research and development services, fund allocations, and infrastructure, etc. (Hussain et al., 2012b, Hussain et al., 2012a).

Global ethnobotanical information and uses of plants by local people are beneficial not only for conserving traditional knowledge but also for drug development and community health care (Farooq et al., 2014). A wide-ranging ethnomedicinal data on Asteraceae plants from Pakistan may provide baseline data for the discovery of novel drug constituents and other products with the addition of pertinent data on the ongoing research on global Asteraceae ethnobotany. Inspired by the medicinal implication of the Asteraceae family, documentation of a comprehensive and systematic review of the ethnobotanical medicine of this family from Pakistan was necessary, which has not been summarised previously. Therefore, the primary objective of this review was to compile all available data on the ethnobotany of the Asteraceae family in Pakistan with the elucidation of species distribution pattern, geography, disease categories, growth forms, plant parts used, modes of preparation of ethnomedicine remedy and administration routes with emphasis on their global conservation status. It will also provide comprehensive indigenous knowledge on Asteraceae plants for the treatment of various diseases, which are ready to be additionally evaluated for pharmacological, biological, and toxicologic characterisation.