Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Melilotus officinalis is a single homeopathic remedy. It is made from yellow sweet clover, a wild plant with small yellow flowers. Homeopaths have used it mainly for pounding headaches and for nosebleeds.
The remedy is made by diluting the plant over and over, with shaking at each step. At 30C there is, for all practical purposes, no plant left in the pill. Trials in people have not shown homeopathic pills to work better than a dummy pill.
Long use in a tradition is not proof that a remedy works. This page reports the tradition and the evidence side by side. We keep the two apart so you can judge both.
Homeopathy holds that a tiny, much diluted dose can push the body to fix the same symptoms the whole plant would cause. No one has shown how that could work. Lab and body tests have not found such an effect.
At 30C the pill holds no plant matter you could measure. So there is no drug action to point to. Feeling better is best put down to time, hope, and the care of a good consultation.
You will usually find it as small sugar pills or pellets. Liquid drops in alcohol and water are also sold.
Common strengths are 6C, 12C, 30C and 200C. A mother tincture (the raw plant extract) also exists, and it is the one form that can still carry plant chemicals.
Yellow sweet clover grows across Europe and Asia and now grows wild in North America. Folk healers used the fresh herb on the skin and as a tea for aches and swelling.
Homeopathic writers in the United States in the late 1800s described the diluted remedy for a full, throbbing head and for nosebleeds. It has stayed a small, second-line remedy rather than a famous one.
See a doctor if a nosebleed lasts more than 20 minutes, keeps coming back, or follows a head injury. Get urgent help for a sudden, very severe headache, a headache with fever, a stiff neck, vomiting, weakness, confusion or trouble speaking. Also see a doctor about bruises you cannot explain, blood in your stool or urine, or bleeding gums, and about any headache that keeps getting worse over days or weeks.
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 Melilotus officinalis 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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