Burseraceae
Boswellia serrata
Indian frankincense · Salai guggul · Shallaki
- Part used
- resin
- Native range
- Dry hill forest of India and Pakistan
- Morphology
- A deciduous tree to about five metres with papery peeling bark and pinnate leaves. Tapping the trunk yields a fragrant gum-resin that hardens into pale tears.
What is in it
Evidence
One of the better-evidenced entries from the Ayurvedic materia medica. Several randomised trials and meta-analyses report reduced pain and improved function in osteoarthritis, with effects comparable to some conventional options. Trials are mostly small and some are industry-funded.
Safety
Well tolerated. Gastrointestinal upset is the commonest complaint. Not adequately studied in pregnancy.
Interactions: Possible effects on drug-metabolising enzymes; poorly characterised
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
Tapped and traded for millennia. Related Boswellia species are the source of the frankincense of the incense trade, and the resins have been used medicinally across South Asia and the Middle East as long as they have been burned.
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
Boswellia is one of the few plants in this collection where the traditional indication, the laboratory mechanism and the clinical trials all point the same way. Boswellic acids inhibit 5-lipoxygenase, an inflammatory pathway distinct from the one NSAIDs act on, and the osteoarthritis trials are reasonably consistent.
The pressure is on the trees rather than on the evidence. Frankincense-producing Boswellia across the Horn of Africa and Arabia are in documented decline from over-tapping — a tapped tree produces fewer viable seeds — and researchers have warned that production could halve within decades. The resin that has been traded for four thousand years is being harvested faster than the trees can recover.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.