🍋 Lemon balm

Plants & herbs · Video research · Mind & nervous system · Lemon balm · Sajah Popham

Lemon balm and the overactive thyroid

Herbalist Sajah Popham calls lemon balm the happiest herb on Earth and picks it for the overactive thyroid: it cools, calms the nerves and the racing heart, and — he says — acts on the thyroid itself. The calming is real in small trials, and one trial found fewer palpitations. The thyroid action is real too, but only in test tubes and rats in the 1980s: extracts kept the thyroid's stimulating signal, and the antibodies of Graves' disease, off their receptor. No trial has given lemon balm alone to people with an overactive thyroid, so it belongs beside medical care, not instead of it. Its traditional dose is a tea of 1.5–4.5 g of leaf; the EU monograph doesn't advise it under 12, for lack of data.

0 human trials of lemon balm alone for an overactive thyroid

16 min read · 52 sources (37 peer-reviewed)