Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Buhaeseok is pumice. It is a light, frothy rock thrown out by volcanoes. Korean medicine grinds it to a powder and uses it as a single drug.
It is used most often for a cough with thick, sticky mucus that is hard to bring up. It is also a folk remedy for lumps in the neck and for stones and burning pain when you pass urine.
The modern evidence is thin. We found no human trials of pumice for any of these uses, so no one can say it works. Long use in a tradition is not proof of effect, and that point applies to everything below.
No one has shown how pumice acts in the body, and it may not act at all.
In the old East Asian system of ideas, buhaeseok is cool, salty and sinking. It is said to soften hard lumps and thin sticky phlegm (thick mucus) so that a cough can clear it. Those are ideas from tradition, not measured drug actions.
Pumice is mostly silica, a rock mineral that barely dissolves. Most of a dose you swallow likely passes through the gut and out again. Any effect on the lungs from a rock taken by mouth is unproven.
The usual form is a fine grey powder made by grinding washed rock.
Some shops sell a calcined form. This means the rock is heated in a fire first, then crushed. Practitioners mostly add the powder to a mixed formula rather than give it alone.
In a decoction (a boiled water brew) the grit is tied in a cloth bag and boiled longer than the herbs. Pumice is also pressed into pills and mixed powders. It is not sold as a standard capsule supplement in most countries.
Chinese texts list pumice as fu hai shi, which means floating sea stone. Korean medicine took the drug in and calls it buhaeseok or haebuseok.
It appears in East Asian materia medica books from about the Song era onward. It sits in the small group of phlegm-clearing minerals.
In Korea it was never a headline herb. It was used inside mixed formulas, rarely on its own.
See a doctor if a cough lasts more than three weeks, brings up blood, or comes with fever, chest pain or weight loss.
Get urgent care if you cannot pass urine, see blood in your urine, or have severe pain in your side or back. A lump in the neck that grows, or one that comes with a changed voice or trouble swallowing, also needs checking soon.
Go to hospital if you get sudden breathing trouble, severe stomach pain with no bowel movement, or if a child swallows the powder.
Evidence grades and traditional-use labels are explained in our methodology. Nothing here is medical advice.
What it is typically used for, usual dose, cautions, and the study behind it where real trial data exists.
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