Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Sandal Safed is the pale, sweet-smelling heartwood of the white sandalwood tree. In Unani medicine it is a single drug. That means one plant, used on its own.
Its Latin name is Santalum album. It is also called White sandalwood. Healers have used it for hundreds of years as a "cooling" remedy.
It is given for burning urine, fever, thirst, restlessness and hot, sore skin.
You will meet it as a wood powder, or as a paste ground on stone. It also comes as a distilled water (arq sandal) and a sweet syrup (sharbat sandal). The essential oil is costly and is used mostly on the skin.
Here is the honest verdict. This is a deep-rooted traditional medicine with very little human trial evidence.
Long use tells you that people trusted it. It does not by itself prove the remedy works. Keep that in mind for everything said below.
No one has shown clearly how Sandal Safed works in the body. Most of what we know comes from lab dishes and animal tests. Very little comes from people.
In that lab work, sandalwood oil compounds calm inflammation. That means heat, redness and swelling. They also slow the growth of some bacteria.
On the skin, the oil is mildly cooling and antiseptic (germ-killing). That fits its old use on rashes and pimples.
Unani theory explains it in another way. It calls the drug cold and dry. It uses the drug to settle "hot" states such as fever, thirst and burning urine.
That is a traditional idea, not a tested body process.
Common forms include:
Wood powder (safoof), taken by mouth or mixed into a paste.
Sandalwood paste, ground fresh with water or rosewater. It goes on the forehead or the skin.
Arq sandal, a distilled water taken as a cooling drink.
Sharbat sandal, a sweet syrup often given for fever or burning urine.
Sandalwood essential oil, very strong and very costly. It is used mostly on the skin or in perfume.
Cheap "sandalwood" oils are often fake. Many are blends of other species, such as Santalum spicatum, or of unrelated woods. True Santalum album is scarce and protected.
Sandalwood has been traded out of southern India for well over two thousand years. Unani doctors in Persia, and later in India, took it up as a leading cooling drug.
Classical texts list it for fevers, palpitations (a pounding or racing heart) and burning urine.
It holds a like place in Ayurveda (chandana), in Siddha, and in Chinese medicine (tan xiang). It also has a ritual place in Hindu, Buddhist and Sufi practice.
That spread across several separate traditions is why its traditional standing is rated top tier.
See a doctor now if you have burning urine along with fever, back pain, shivering, or blood in your urine. Those point to a kidney infection that needs antibiotics.
Get medical advice if burning urine has not settled within two days, if a fever lasts more than three days, or if a rash spreads, blisters or weeps.
Go to an emergency department if someone swallows sandalwood essential oil, or if you get a swollen face or lips, a widespread hives rash, or trouble breathing after using it.
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 Sandal Safed 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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