Lamiaceae
Scutellaria baicalensis
Huang qin · Baikal skullcap
- Part used
- root
- Native range
- Northeastern China, Mongolia, Siberia and Korea
- Morphology
- A perennial to about forty centimetres with narrow leaves and one-sided racemes of blue-purple flowers, over a thick yellow root.
What is in it
Evidence
Little controlled evidence for the herb itself. Its flavones are extensively studied in the laboratory. It appears in the combination product PHY906, which has been studied as a chemotherapy adjunct.
Safety
Hepatotoxicity is reported, particularly from combination products, and it is one of the herbs implicated in liver injury cases attributed to Chinese preparations. Confusion with American skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora, is common, and American skullcap products have historically been adulterated with germander, which is itself hepatotoxic.
Interactions: Possible effects on drug-metabolising enzymes; Additive liver risk
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 the Shennong Bencao Jing and among the most frequently used herbs in the materia medica for two thousand years.
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
Skullcap is a name that covers two unrelated medicinal plants and one long-running adulteration scandal.
Chinese Scutellaria baicalensis and American S. lateriflora are different species with different chemistry used for different things. Worse, American skullcap products through much of the twentieth century were repeatedly found to contain Teucrium — germander — which causes liver failure and was banned in France after a cluster of hepatitis cases.
So liver injury attributed to skullcap may be the plant, or a different plant, or a third plant substituted for the second. That chain of uncertainty is the ordinary condition of the herbal supply chain rather than an unusual failure.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.