Ingredient deep-dive

Stone Root: What PubMed Actually Has

A search of the entire PubMed database for Collinsonia canadensis, stone root’s botanical name, returns four results in total. Two are clinical articles from 1887 and 1888. One identified a new compound in the plant and tested nothing. One tested 897 different herbs against a cancer cell line, stone root among them. That is the complete published record.

By GlucoPril Team · Last updated September 25, 2026 · 9 min read · Ingredient deep-dive

What stone root is, and where its reputation comes from

Collinsonia canadensis is a tall perennial in the mint family, native to woodland in eastern North America, with a thick knotty rhizome that gives it both its common name and its folk reputation: stone root, said to resemble small stones, and sometimes credited — without modern evidence — with a traditional use for kidney or bladder stones. Its better-documented traditional use, from 19th-century American Eclectic medicine, was for haemorrhoids and varicose veins, the same territory as several of its labelmates on this bottle.

That Eclectic tradition is exactly what it sounds like: a 19th-century American school of botanical medicine, with its own journals, its own materia medica, and no access to the randomised controlled trial, which was not developed as a research standard until the 20th century. The two historical papers below come from that era and that tradition.

Every paper PubMed has, read one at a time

This section is short because the literature is short. A search for “Collinsonia canadensis” against the entire PubMed database, with no date or study-type filter, returns exactly four records. Here is each one.

An 1887 article in the British Medical Journal, titled simply “Collinsonia Canadensis,” by J.V. Shoemaker. It is a clinical account from the era before controlled trials, describing the plant’s traditional use rather than testing it against a comparator.

An 1888 article, also titled “Collinsonia Canadensis,” in The Southern Medical Record, an American Eclectic-tradition journal. Like the 1887 piece, it is a period clinical account, not a controlled study.

A 1999 phytochemistry paper in the Journal of Natural Products isolated a new flavonoid, 2,5-dihydroxy-6,7-dimethoxyflavanone, from the leaf and stem exudates of Collinsonia canadensis, alongside three previously known flavones. This is chemistry, not biology: the paper identifies what compounds are present in the plant and runs no test of what those compounds do in a body.

A 2014 high-throughput screening study tested 897 aqueous extracts of commonly used natural products, including stone root, for anti-mitotic activity against MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells — a search for the next paclitaxel, modelled on how that cancer drug was originally found in a botanical screen. Stone root was one of the 897 extracts tested. The paper's list of the most potent anti-mitotic herbs found in that screen does not include it, and the study has no connection to veins, circulation or glucose at all; it is cited here only because it is the newest entry PubMed has under this plant's name.

This is the complete PubMed record for Collinsonia canadensis at the time of writing. No entry in it is a controlled human trial, an animal efficacy study, or a test of any glucose-related outcome.

What an empty modern literature actually means

It is worth being precise about what four papers, none of them a controlled trial, does and does not establish. It does not mean stone root is unsafe: nothing in the record suggests harm either, because almost nothing in the record tests it at all. It does not mean the 19th-century Eclectic tradition was wrong about what it observed in patients; traditional clinical observation is a real, if limited, form of evidence, and it is simply not the same form as a placebo-controlled trial.

What it does mean is that none of the claims this article could otherwise make about dose, mechanism or effect size — the kind of numbers the gotu kola article or the grape seed article on this site can print with a PMID beside them — exist to print for this plant. Where other ingredient pages on this site say “the trial used this dose, for this outcome,” the honest sentence for stone root is that no trial like that has been run.

Six labelmates, six PubMed counts

Numbers are more useful side by side than alone, so here is a plain search-count comparison: searching PubMed for each plant’s Latin binomial as an exact phrase, with no filter for study type, on the same day this article was written.

A raw hit count is a blunt instrument — it mixes trials, case reports, chemistry papers and reviews without weighting them — and it is still a fair, checkable measure of how much attention a plant has received from any branch of published research. Every other name on this label clears at least forty papers. Stone root clears four.

That gap of roughly twenty-to-one between stone root and its next-thinnest labelmate is not a rounding error, and it is not a comment on the plant’s traditional reputation, which this article has tried to describe fairly. It is a comment on how much anyone, in over a century of indexed biomedical publishing, has gone looking.

How the record lines up with this label

The first column is the entire published record. The second is read off the seller’s artwork. The third is what a buyer is left holding.

What is on the safety record

Because the modern literature is essentially silent, there is no published human trial safety data to summarise for stone root specifically. The 2014 cell-screening study used an aqueous extract at concentrations designed for laboratory testing, not oral human dosing, and its results have no bearing on safety at supplement doses.

• No modern clinical safety data exists for Collinsonia canadensis at supplement-level intakes.
• No drug-interaction study of stone root was found in this search.
• Traditional use describes it as generally well tolerated, but that description predates modern adverse-event reporting standards.
• The label direction for this product covers all seven plants at once: for healthy adults, not for pregnancy or nursing.

What to make of it on this bottle

Of the seven names on this label, stone root has by a wide margin the thinnest published record. Horse chestnut and butcher’s broom, its two labelmates from the same traditional venous category, each carry a real placebo-controlled trial and a pooled systematic review. Gotu kola carries four dose-ranging trials. Stone root carries two 19th-century case narratives, a chemistry paper, and a cameo in an unrelated cancer screen.

That is not a claim that stone root does nothing — absence of research is not evidence of absence of effect, and a great many traditional botanicals simply have not been studied with modern methods yet. It is a claim about what a reader can actually verify today: for six of the seven names on this bottle, some real research literature exists to check a claim against. For this one, there is almost none to check.

References