Apiaceae
Angelica sinensis
Dang gui · Dong quai · Chinese angelica
- Part used
- root
- Native range
- China, chiefly Gansu province, at altitude
- Morphology
- A stout aromatic perennial to a metre with divided leaves and umbels of small white flowers, over a fleshy branched aromatic root.
What is in it
Evidence
Trials of dang gui alone for menopausal hot flushes have found no benefit over placebo. It is almost never used alone in the tradition, which practitioners reasonably point out, and combination formulas have not been tested to a comparable standard.
Safety
Contains coumarins and has documented anticoagulant activity, with case reports of raised INR in people on warfarin. Photosensitivity from furanocoumarins. Avoided in pregnancy in traditional practice and on the strength of uterine-stimulant reports.
Interactions: Potentiates warfarin and other anticoagulants — documented, not theoretical; Photosensitising; caution with other photosensitising drugs
Regulatory: Permitted as a listed medicine ingredient in Australia.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
In use for around two thousand years, and so strongly associated with women’s complaints that its Chinese name is often glossed as "should return", referring to a husband returning to a wife restored to health.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Dang gui is the sharpest test of the argument that Chinese herbs cannot be assessed singly.
Western trials gave it alone for menopausal symptoms and found nothing. Practitioners objected that this is not how it is used — it appears in formulas, adjusted to a diagnosed pattern, almost never on its own. That objection is entirely fair as a description of the practice.
It is also unfalsifiable in the form it is usually offered. A claim that only the individualised formula works, and that no standardised test can capture it, cannot be tested by any available design. Both things are true at once, and the field has been stuck there for thirty years.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.