The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing – Socrates

Cnidium monnieri, common name Monnier’s snowparsley is a potent medicinal plant, with a history of use in Eastern Asia. Taxonomically it is classified as a member of the Apiaceae (umbellifers), a botanical family that includes snowparsley, cowparsley, carrots, parsnips, parsley, angelica, fennel, coriander, celery, cowparsely and many others. Some of them appear in this week’s cover picture. The dried Cnidium fruits are bottom left, and the tangled brown roots (right) are #Angelica, another medicinal plant (Leaf 23 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6907958591639404545?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6907958591639404545%29).The small white flowers of snowparsely (Cnidium), cowparsley are visuallysimilar, as are flowers of another family member, #Hemlock, a highly poisonous plant that contains neurotoxic alkaloids such as coniine.

Cnidium (She Chuang Zi in Chinese),thankfully, does not contain significant levels of neurotoxins. Its fruits, however, are rich in coumarins, discussed previously for their role in plantiron update (Leaf 13) https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6882654754711855104?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6882654754711855104%29).The main coumarin is called #Osthol, suggested for treating numerous disordersincluding skin disorders, diabetes, carcinomas, coronavirus (Kiba et al, 2021),infertility, male and female sexual dysfunction, etc. Cnidium fruit alsocontains #Imperatorin, a substituted psoralen also of pharmacological relevance(Kozioł & Skalicka-Woźniak, 2016).

It has been shown that Osthol acts onmammalian TRPV3 calcium channels thereby relieving itch (Sun et al., 2018). Thus Cnidium extract is frequently added to topical preparations designed to calm pruritis (itch) associated with insect bites, burns, allergies, after-shaveirritation, dermatitis and other skin conditions.

Further reading

Cnidium Monnieri (She Chuang Zi) - Proven Herbal Remedies. https://www.chineseherbshealing.com/proven-herbal-remedies/cnidium-monnieri.html

Hotti,H., & Rischer, H. (2017). The killer of Socrates: Coniine and Related Alkaloids in the Plant Kingdom. Molecules 22(11), 1962. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules22111962