Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Track Goshuyu with reminders and record whether it helped, in the app.
Goshuyu is the dried, unripe fruit of a small tree, Tetradium ruticarpum. In the West it is often sold as Evodia fruit. It is one of the single herbs used in Kampo, the Japanese school of herbal medicine.
Kampo uses it to warm a cold stomach. It is given for vomiting, watery spit-up and belly pain that feel worse in the cold. It is also used for a dull headache that comes with nausea and cold hands and feet.
The honest verdict: the traditional record is long and strong, but good human trials of Goshuyu on its own have not been published. A long history of use is not proof that a herb works, and that holds for everything in this library.
Read the safety part below before you try it. Goshuyu changes the way your body breaks down some common drugs, so it is not a herb to add on a whim.
No one has shown how Goshuyu works in people. What follows is the best current thinking, not proven fact.
The fruit is sharp and hot on the tongue. Lab work suggests its main compounds act on nerve endings that sense heat and pain in the gut. That may be why Kampo describes the herb as warming the middle of the body and settling nausea.
One effect is well shown in lab and animal work. A compound called rutaecarpine speeds up CYP1A2, a liver enzyme (a body protein) that breaks down many medicines. When that enzyme works faster, some drugs are cleared too quickly and stop working as well.
That same finding is the reason this page carries a long interactions list. It is a safety fact, not a health benefit.
You will see Goshuyu in these forms:
Dried whole fruit, simmered in water to make a decoction (a strong tea).
Extract granules or powder, the usual form in Japanese pharmacies.
Capsules and tablets, often labelled Evodia, sold as a supplement in the West.
As one part of a Kampo formula. The best known is Goshuyuto, which pairs it with ginger, ginseng and jujube. Most traditional use is in a formula, not as a single herb.
Goshuyu is an old herb, not a new one. It appears in the Chinese classic Shang Han Lun, written around 200 CE, in the formula known there as Wu Zhu Yu Tang.
Chinese medicine, Korean medicine and Japanese Kampo all kept it. Kampo doctors of the Edo period (1603-1868) wrote it up in detail for cold-type vomiting and headache.
It is still made and prescribed in Japan today as a licensed Kampo ingredient.
See a doctor the same day if vomiting will not stop, if you cannot keep fluids down, or if there is blood in your vomit or black tarry stools.
Get urgent help for a sudden, severe headache, the worst you have had, or a headache with fever, a stiff neck, weakness, numbness or trouble speaking.
Stop the herb and call your doctor if your skin or the whites of your eyes turn yellow, your urine turns dark, or you get bad pain under your right ribs. These can be signs of liver trouble.
Also call if you bruise easily or bleed more than usual, or if any medicine you take starts to feel less effective. Tell whoever treats you that you have been taking Goshuyu.
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 Goshuyu 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.
One email with the summary. We'll also send a short weekly evidence update — unsubscribe any time.
