Chiretta

Loss of appetite with a coated tongue and slow, weak digestion, calling for a simple bitter to restore stomach tone

Recurring low-grade fevers with a sluggish liver and sallow complexion

Overview. Chiretta is an erect annual herb of the gentian family, native to the temperate Himalayan foothills of northern India and Nepal, where the whole flowering plant, roots included, is harvested and dried for use. It was adopted into Western physiomedical and eclectic practice in the nineteenth century as an import valued for its intense, pure bitterness, and it remains a staple bitter tonic in Ayurvedic medicine under the name kirātatiktā. Physiomedicalists placed it alongside the native gentians as a relaxing bitter that restores tone to an atonic stomach.

Overview. Chirata is the dried whole flowering plant of Swertia chirayita, a small annual gentian native to the temperate Himalayan region from Kashmir to Bhutan. It has long been prized in both Ayurvedic medicine, where it is known as kirata-tikta, and in nineteenth century Eclectic and official Western pharmacy, where it was formally recognized in early editions of the United States Pharmacopoeia as an intensely bitter tonic and febrifuge. The whole herb, harvested and dried at flowering, is the part used, most often as a cold infusion, fluid extract, or tincture.

Overview. Ophelia chirata, better known today as Swertia chirayita, is an erect annual or biennial herb of the gentian family, about a meter tall, with purple-tinged four-lobed flowers, native to the temperate Himalaya from Kashmir through Nepal to Bhutan and Meghalaya at 1200 to 3000 meters. The whole plant, harvested in flower, is Kiratatikta, one of the great bitters of Ayurveda and its foremost fever herb after Guduchi. Its intense bitterness comes from amarogentin, one of the most bitter natural compounds known, and the plant has long been traded down to the plains and exported as chiretta.

Clinical Notes. Chiretta is reached for when appetite has failed and digestion has become sluggish, particularly in convalescence from a febrile illness or in a person whose tongue is coated and whose stomach seems to have simply stopped doing its work.