Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Carbo vegetabilis is a homeopathic single remedy prepared from vegetable charcoal — wood such as birch, beech or poplar that has been charred with very little air. Homeopaths have given it for many years for bloating, burping and trapped wind, and for people who feel weak, cold and breathless. Its Latin name is Carbo vegetabilis, and it is also sold as vegetable charcoal.
It is made by serial dilution. The charcoal is ground with sugar, then diluted again and again, with vigorous shaking at each step. At the usual 30C strength essentially none of the original charcoal remains in the pill you take.
The evidence verdict is short. Controlled trials have not shown this remedy to do more than a dummy pill, so its standing rests on tradition rather than proof. Traditional use is not proof that something works, and that point is made here once rather than repeated in every section below.
This is not the same thing as activated charcoal capsules from a pharmacy, which are a real drug in a real dose. If you want the charcoal itself, you need that product, not this one.
There is no accepted explanation for how a 30C homeopathic pill could act on the body, because no measurable source material is left in it.
Homeopathy works from the idea of 'like cures like'. A substance thought to cause certain symptoms in a healthy person is given in tiny dilution to someone with similar symptoms. Carbo vegetabilis is picked for gas, bloating and a feeling of air hunger (needing to gulp for air).
Homeopaths also say the shaking between dilutions leaves some kind of imprint of the charcoal in the water or sugar. No experiment has shown such an imprint exists. It does not fit what chemistry and physics currently describe.
Raw charcoal does have a real effect in the gut: it soaks up gases and chemicals on its surface. That effect needs grams of charcoal, and a homeopathic 30C pill contains none of it. So any improvement people notice after taking the remedy is best explained by placebo response, by settling of the problem on its own, or by other things they did at the same time.
Carbo vegetabilis comes as small sugar pillules, granules or liquid drops, sold in set strengths.
Common strengths are 6C, 30C and 200C. Lower decimal strengths such as 6X and 30X are also sold, along with LM potencies used by some practitioners.
Pillules are usually made of sucrose or lactose (milk sugar). Drops are usually water and alcohol. Lactose-free and alcohol-free versions exist if you ask for them.
Carbo vegetabilis entered homeopathy through Samuel Hahnemann, who published his 'proving' of charcoal in The Chronic Diseases in the late 1820s and 1830s.
Charcoal itself has a much older record. Cooks, healers and early physicians in Europe, Egypt and India used charred wood for wind, foul smells and wound care.
Inside homeopathy the remedy became a fixture and is still stocked by most homeopathic pharmacies today. That is a long record in one tradition, not a record across several.
See a doctor if bloating, heartburn, burping or weakness lasts more than two weeks, keeps coming back, or comes with weight loss you did not plan.
Get the same-day advice if you have trouble swallowing, are vomiting repeatedly, or your stools look black or bloody.
Call emergency services straight away for crushing chest pain, sudden shortness of breath, fainting, or cold clammy skin with a racing heartbeat. Do not wait to see whether a remedy helps.
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 Carbo vegetabilis 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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