Lamiaceae
Teucrium chamaedrys
Wall germander
- Part used
- aerial
- Native range
- Europe, the Mediterranean and western Asia
- Morphology
- A low spreading perennial to about thirty centimetres with small glossy toothed leaves resembling a tiny oak — which the name records — and whorls of pinkish-purple flowers.
What is in it
Evidence
No supported use. Its entire modern significance is toxicological.
Safety
Hepatotoxic. Teucrin A is metabolised into reactive compounds that damage liver cells. Around thirty cases of hepatitis, including deaths and cases requiring transplant, followed its promotion as a slimming aid in France, and it was banned there in 1992. It is also the substance repeatedly found substituted for American skullcap in the herbal supply chain.
Interactions: Additive liver risk
Regulatory: Banned in France since 1992. Not a permitted 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
Used across Europe from the classical period for gout and digestion. Promoted in France in the 1980s as a weight-loss aid, which is what exposed its toxicity.
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
Germander matters here for two reasons, and the second is why it appears alongside American skullcap.
The first is a clean toxicological case. It was used in Europe for centuries with no recognised hepatotoxicity, then promoted in France as a slimming capsule in the 1980s, and within a few years had produced around thirty cases of hepatitis and several deaths. France banned it in 1992. The plant had not changed; the dose and the duration had, which is the same story as ephedra and green tea extract.
The second is that germander has repeatedly been found substituted for American skullcap in commercial herbal products. Liver injury attributed to skullcap through much of the twentieth century was, in a number of documented instances, germander wearing its label — which means a safety signal was attached to the wrong plant for decades.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.