Urticaceae
Urtica dioica
Stinging nettle · Common nettle
- Part used
- leafroot
- Native range
- Europe, Asia, north Africa; naturalised worldwide
- Morphology
- A perennial to two metres with opposite toothed leaves and drooping green flower spikes, the whole plant armed with hollow silica hairs that break off and inject their contents.
What is in it
Evidence
Nettle root has some trial support for lower urinary tract symptoms in benign prostatic hyperplasia, though weaker than the pharmaceutical comparators. Leaf preparations for arthritis and allergic rhinitis have small and inconsistent studies.
Safety
The sting is painful and self-limiting. Ingestion of cooked or dried leaf is benign and nutritionally useful. Root and leaf are chemically different and are used for different things, which is a common source of confusion.
Interactions: Theoretical effects on blood glucose and blood pressure at high intake; Vitamin K content interacts with warfarin
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient.
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
Food, fibre and medicine across Europe for as long as there are records. Nettle cloth was made from the Bronze Age into the twentieth century, and German uniforms in the First World War were partly nettle fibre when cotton ran short. Urtication — deliberately stinging arthritic joints — is recorded from Roman times.
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
Urtication looks like superstition and has a coherent rationale: deliberately provoking inflammation in a painful joint as a counter-irritant. The sting delivers histamine and serotonin directly through the skin, and the resulting flare is the point rather than an accident.
Whether it helps is not established. That it is doing something specific and intentional, rather than being a folk absurdity, is clear enough — and it is one of the few traditional practices whose mechanism was fully understood before anyone tested whether it worked.
The plant is also a reminder that root and leaf can be separate medicines. Nettle root is used for the prostate; nettle leaf is a food and a mineral source. Buying the wrong one is buying a different plant.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.