Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Petroleum is a single homeopathic remedy. Its Latin name is Oleum petrae, and it is also called rock oil or crude petroleum. Homeopaths give it most often for dry, cracked skin and for travel sickness.
The remedy is made by diluting crude rock oil again and again, with a hard shake at each step. At the common 30C strength there is, for all practical purposes, none of the oil left in the pill. Trials do not show that it works better than a dummy pill (placebo).
Long use inside a tradition is not proof that something works. This page keeps the two apart: what homeopathy says, and what studies show. Nowhere else on this page will we repeat that point.
No one has shown how this remedy could work in the body.
Homeopathy rests on two ideas. The first is "like cures like". Raw crude oil can burn skin and upset the stomach, so homeopaths give tiny doses of it for cracked skin and travel sickness.
The second idea is that shaking the liquid at each step leaves some "imprint" of the starting oil. There is no known way for water or a sugar pill to hold such an imprint. Lab work has not found one.
A 30C pill has been diluted one part in a hundred, thirty times over. The odds that even one molecule of crude oil is left are close to zero. So any change a person notices is most likely placebo, which is the real lift people feel from care, hope and time.
That does not mean people are making it up. Dry skin and travel sickness both come and go on their own. A remedy taken at the right moment can look like the cause of a change it did not cause.
Small sugar pellets are the most common form. Liquid drops in water and alcohol are also sold.
Usual strengths are 6C, 12C, 30C and 200C. The number counts the dilution steps. A higher number means more dilution, not more power in the normal sense of the word.
Some creams list Petroleum for dry skin. Read the label with care. A cream may also hold real petroleum jelly, which is a different thing and does work, simply as a barrier that holds water in the skin.
Petroleum came into homeopathy in the early 1800s. Samuel Hahnemann, who founded homeopathy, gave crude rock oil to healthy helpers and wrote down what they felt. Those notes, called a proving, set the remedy's picture: dry cracked skin, itching in cold weather, and travel sickness.
Rock oil was used long before that. People skimmed it from natural seeps and rubbed it on sore joints and rough skin.
Inside homeopathy the remedy has been in steady use ever since. It is listed in the main materia medica books, which are the reference books of remedies, and most homeopathic pharmacies stock it.
See a doctor or pharmacist if a crack in your skin will not close after two weeks, bleeds a lot, or turns red, hot, swollen or full of pus. Get help the same day if you also have a fever or a red streak spreading from the sore.
Get medical help for travel sickness if you cannot keep fluids down, feel dizzy or faint, or your urine turns dark. Those are signs of losing too much fluid.
Call emergency services at once if anyone swallows raw rock oil, crude petroleum or lamp oil, or breathes it in. Do not make the person vomit.
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 Petroleum 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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