Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Chakramarda is the seed and leaf of the plant Cassia tora, a low weedy annual that grows along Indian roadsides and field edges. Ayurveda uses it as a single drug, meaning it is given on its own rather than inside a fixed multi-herb formula. English names for it include foetid cassia and sickle senna.
It has two main traditional jobs. Ground into a paste with buttermilk or lime juice, it is applied to itchy, ring-shaped, scaly skin patches (dadru, roughly ringworm). Taken by mouth as a seed powder, it is used as a gentle bowel-moving herb.
Honest verdict on the evidence: almost everything we know comes from laboratory dishes and animal studies, not from people. Long and respected traditional use is not proof that a remedy works, and we say that here once rather than repeating it in every section below.
The bowel effect is the one with a plausible chemical basis. The seeds contain anthraquinones (plant compounds that stimulate the lining of the large intestine), the same chemical family found in senna. They pull water into the gut and speed things along, which can loosen stools.
The skin use is far less certain. Laboratory tests show some of its compounds slow the growth of certain fungi and bacteria in a dish. A dish is not a person, and no good human trial shows the paste clears a skin infection.
Traditional theory describes it as scraping away kapha and pitta from the skin and clearing ama (undigested residue). That is a traditional explanation, not a measured mechanism.
The most common forms are a dried seed powder (churna) taken by mouth, and a fresh or dried leaf paste (lepa) applied to the skin. Some suppliers sell a water or alcohol extract in capsules.
The seeds are also roasted and brewed as a coffee-like drink, and young leaves are cooked and eaten as a green vegetable in parts of India. Food-level use is far milder than a concentrated seed powder.
Quality control is patchy. Cassia tora seed is sometimes confused or mixed with Cassia occidentalis seed, which is genuinely toxic, so buy only from a supplier who tests and names the species.
Chakramarda appears in the classical Ayurvedic texts as a kushtaghna (skin-disease) drug, used mainly outwardly for itchy, ringed rashes. Its Sanskrit name points to the circular shape of those patches.
The same seed is a long-standing staple of Chinese medicine under the name jue ming zi, used there for constipation and for red, irritated eyes. That gives it classical standing in more than one tradition.
It has also been a famine and everyday food plant in rural India, eaten as a cooked leafy green.
See a doctor if your constipation has not settled within a week, or if you have stomach pain, blood in your stool, or a sudden change in your usual bowel habit.
Get urgent medical help if you have a fast, slow or irregular heartbeat, severe muscle weakness, fainting, or cramping with heavy vomiting or diarrhoea. These can be signs that your potassium has dropped too low.
Also see a doctor if a skin patch spreads, weeps, becomes painful, or has not improved after two weeks of treatment.
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 Chakramarda 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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