Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Ammonium carbonicum is a homeopathic remedy. It is made from ammonium carbonate. That is the white salt once sold as sal volatile, or smelling salts.
Homeopaths pick it for people with a stuffy nose and a tight chest. The person often feels weak, cold and short of breath. Some also give it for nosebleeds and heavy periods.
The salt is diluted over and over, with hard shaking at each step. At the usual 30C strength, almost none of the starting salt is left. A pellet is mostly sugar; the liquid drops are mostly water and alcohol.
Trials have not shown that it works better than a placebo (a dummy pill). Long use in one tradition is not proof that a thing works. This page gives you both sides: what homeopaths use it for, and what the evidence shows.
There is no known way for this remedy to act on the body at common strengths. That is the plain answer.
Homeopathy rests on two old ideas. The first is "like cures like": a substance that causes a symptom in a well person is said to ease that symptom in a sick one. Raw ammonium carbonate stings the nose and airways, so the remedy is matched to blocked, wheezy breathing.
The second idea is that shaking a dilution makes it stronger, not weaker. Chemistry does not support this. By 30C the salt has been diluted so far that a dose is very unlikely to hold even one molecule of it.
When people feel better after taking it, the likely reasons are the placebo effect, the natural fading of a cold, and the long, careful chat with a homeopath. Those effects are real and can feel helpful. They are not the same as the remedy acting on your lungs.
Sugar pellets are the most common form. They are small, sweet and dissolve under the tongue.
You may also see soft tablets, granules in a single-dose tube, and liquid drops in dilute alcohol.
Strengths are written as 6C, 30C and 200C, or as 3X, 6X and 12X. The higher the number, the more dilution steps were used and the less of the starting salt is present. Combination cold and cough products sometimes list Ammonium carbonicum among several ingredients.
Ammonium carbonate has a long life outside homeopathy. It was the sal volatile of the 1700s and 1800s, sniffed to rouse someone who had fainted. Bakers still use it as baker's ammonia in some crisp European biscuits.
As a homeopathic remedy it dates to the early 1800s. It was tested and written up by Samuel Hahnemann and his circle in Germany, then carried into the standard homeopathic materia medica (the reference books that list each remedy and its picture).
It has stayed in those books ever since, which makes it a settled part of one tradition rather than a shared classical remedy.
Call for emergency help if you are fighting for breath, your lips or face look blue or grey, you have chest pain, or you feel faint. A child who is breathing fast, grunting or sucking in the ribs needs the same urgent help.
See a doctor within a day if you have a fever above 39C (102F), you are coughing up blood, your throat is so sore you cannot swallow, or a nosebleed will not stop after 20 minutes of steady pressure.
Book an appointment if a cold or cough has not started to lift after 10 days, if it keeps coming back, or if your periods are heavy enough to soak through a pad every hour.
Evidence grades and traditional-use labels are explained in our methodology. Nothing here is medical advice.
Reviewed by the HealisticMD editorial team How we grade evidence →
The published evidence for Ammonium carbonicum is weak or absent. That usually means no controlled trial has tested it, not that a trial found it ineffective — the two are different, and we grade only what has been published.
What it is typically used for, usual dose, cautions, and the study behind it where real trial data exists.
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