Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Ral is a hardened resin. It seeps from the cut bark of the sal tree (Latin name Shorea robusta). The sal tree is a large hardwood tree of north and central India.
In the Persian/Unani tradition, Ral counts as a single drug, not a mix. It is also called sal dammar or Indian dammar. Healers have used it mostly on the skin and as an incense.
In old practice, healers put Ral on wounds, boils, cracked skin and piles. It is blended into an ointment, an oil or a plaster. It is also burned, so the smoke fills a room.
Ral has been given by mouth too, in small amounts. This was for loose stools and for discharges.
Here is the honest verdict up front. Ral has a long and real record in Unani, Ayurvedic and Siddha practice. But there is almost no modern testing in people.
Long use tells you that people valued something. It is not proof that it works. That point applies to everything on this page.
No one has shown, in people, how Ral works. What follows is the old reasoning plus some lab findings. Neither one settles the question.
Unani texts call Ral cold and dry. They class it as a habis, which means something that dries and binds tissue. That is the classic reason for its use on weeping wounds, loose stools and discharges.
In modern terms, the resin is sticky and it repels water. So a layer of it forms a physical seal over broken skin.
Lab work on sal resin and its extracts reports some action against bacteria. It also reports some anti-inflammatory (swelling-reducing) effects in cells and animals.
Test-tube results often fail to repeat in people. So treat this as a possible reason and nothing more.
Ral reaches users in a handful of forms:
Raw lumps or tears of resin, pale yellow to brown, sold by weight.
Powdered resin, used in wound powders and in made-up Unani preparations.
Ointments, plasters and medicated oils, in which the resin has been melted into a fat or oil base.
Incense cones, sticks and loose resin for burning.
There is no standard dose or strength. So the amount of real resin in a shop-bought ointment or incense stick can vary a lot. It is often not stated on the label.
Sal resin has been gathered in India for well over two thousand years. It appears in Ayurvedic texts as sarjarasa.
It later entered Unani practice under the name Ral. Unani is the Persian-Greek medical tradition. It took root in India from about the twelfth century onward.
Unani doctors listed it among the drying, binding drugs. They built it into wound salves and plasters.
Siddha healers of south India used it in much the same way. It also has a second life as a temple and household incense.
So the traditional standing is strong, and it spans more than one system. The modern research record is thin. The two are measured on different scales.
See a doctor if a wound, boil or skin patch gets redder, hotter, more painful or starts oozing pus, or if you get a fever. Those are signs of infection spreading.
See a doctor if a skin problem has not started to improve after about a week of use, or if a rash appears where you applied it.
Get help the same day for bleeding from the back passage, for diarrhoea that lasts more than two days or comes with blood, or for any sudden trouble breathing after burning the resin. Call emergency services for a swollen face or lips, a spreading hives rash, or gasping for air, as these can signal a severe allergic reaction.
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 Ral 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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