Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Iklil-ul-Malik is a single drug (one plant, not a mixture) used in Persian and Unani medicine. Its Latin name is Melilotus officinalis, and in English it is called sweet clover or melilot. The dried flowering tops are the part used.
Tradition uses it two ways. On the skin it is made into a warm paste for swellings, boils and aching joints. By mouth it is given for heavy, swollen legs, for wind and griping in the belly, and as a mild calming herb.
Here is the honest verdict up front: the traditional record is long and wide, but there are no human trials of the whole herb that we can point to. Long traditional use tells you people valued a remedy; it is not proof that it works, and we do not treat it as proof anywhere on this page.
The plant contains coumarin, the compound that gives dried sweet clover its hay-like smell. Coumarin is thought to act on small blood vessels and on lymph flow (the drainage of fluid from the tissues), which is why it has been used for puffy, heavy legs.
This is a proposed idea, not a settled fact for the whole herb. Most of the work behind it used purified coumarin in a lab or in animals, not the dried plant.
One point matters for safety. If sweet clover is damp, mouldy or badly stored, moulds turn its coumarin into dicoumarol, a strong blood thinner. This is a real chemical change, not a theory, and it has killed cattle that ate spoiled hay.
Common forms are:
Dried flowering tops, loose or cut, for a tea or infusion.
A warm poultice or plaster, where the softened herb is laid on the skin over a swelling.
A powder, sometimes pressed into Unani tablets or mixed into compound formulas.
European products based on purified coumarin, often blended with troxerutin, sold for leg swelling. These are drug-style products, not the same as the traditional herb.
Melilot appears in Greek writing from Dioscorides onward, mainly as a plaster for swellings and pain. Persian and Arabic physicians carried it forward under the name Iklil-ul-Malik, meaning roughly crown of the king.
It entered Unani practice in South Asia and stayed there, listed for swellings, colic and heaviness of the legs. European herbals kept it too, for much the same jobs.
So the traditional standing is strong and spread across several systems. The trial record is a separate matter and is thin.
Stop taking it and see a doctor the same day if your skin or the whites of your eyes turn yellow, your urine goes dark, or you get pain under your right ribs with deep tiredness. These can be signs of liver trouble.
Get urgent help for bleeding that will not stop, a nosebleed that keeps coming back, blood in your urine or stool, black tarry stools, or bruises appearing for no reason.
See a doctor rather than treating at home if a swollen leg is hot, red and painful, if only one leg swells suddenly, or if a boil is spreading, or you have a fever. Swelling with breathlessness or chest pain is an emergency.
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 Iklil-ul-Malik 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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