Pandan in Traditional Medicine and for Pain

Pandan is unusual among widely used tropical plants in that its traditional-medicine record is thin, domestic and honest about itself. It is not a plant with a formal place in a codified system — not a classical Ayurvedic drug, not a Traditional Chinese Medicine materia medica staple, not a Malay or Thai herb with a canonical set of indications and preparations. It is a kitchen plant that occasionally does household duty.

That matters for how you read the claims. When a plant sits at the centre of a documented tradition — ginseng, turmeric, ginger — the ethnobotanical record is dense enough to be informative even before anyone runs a trial: many practitioners, many centuries, converging indications, described preparations. Pandan's record is nothing like that. It is scattered notes in regional ethnobotanical surveys, mostly of casual use, mostly as a pleasant drink or an aromatic.

This page documents what is actually claimed — including for pain, headache and arthritis, which are the claims most often repeated online — and labels the evidence tier for each. In most cases that tier is traditional use only or UNKNOWN. That is the correct finding for this plant, and stating it plainly is more useful than dressing a scatter of folk uses up as pharmacology.

Table of Contents

1. What Kind of Traditional Record Pandan Has
2. Regional Traditional Uses, Region by Region
3. The Pain, Headache and Arthritis Claims
4. External Application: Poultices, Oils and Baths
5. The Anti-Inflammatory Evidence Such As It Is
6. “Calming”, Restlessness and the Aroma Question
7. The Diuretic and “Cooling” Claims
8. Antimicrobial, Wound and Skin Uses
9. Household and Non-Medicinal Traditional Uses
10. Which Part, and Why the Root Keeps Appearing
11. How to Read a Thin Traditional Record
12. Evidence Tiers for This Page
13. Key Research Papers
14. Connections

What Kind of Traditional Record Pandan Has

Three characteristics define pandan's ethnobotanical footprint, and each has a direct bearing on how much weight the claims can carry.

It is a food plant first, by a very wide margin. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, pandan is a flavouring, a colouring and a wrapper. Ask a cook in any of those countries what pandan is for and the answer will be rice, kaya, cake or curry — not an ailment. Medicinal use is a minor sideline, and pandan's traditional record is best described as a food record with medicinal annotations.

It is domestic rather than professional. Where pandan appears medicinally it is generally in household practice — a mother making a cooling drink, a leaf added to a postpartum bath — rather than in a practitioner's dispensary. Malay jamu, Thai household remedies and Vietnamese thuốc nam all include pandan in this casual register. Household use is real ethnobotany, but it carries much less inferential weight than a formal tradition with dosing conventions and named indications, because nobody was tracking outcomes.

Its indications do not converge. This is the most telling point. In a strong traditional record, independent regions arrive at similar uses for the same plant — convergence across cultures is genuine, if weak, evidence that something is being observed. Pandan's claimed uses scatter: cooling here, diuretic there, restlessness elsewhere, a little for pain, a little for skin, a little for fever. There is no strong cross-cultural convergence on any single indication. That pattern is more consistent with a beloved aromatic being folded into remedies for its smell and palatability than with a plant whose effects people repeatedly noticed.

An important corollary, and a genuinely reassuring one: pandan's long, casual, food-quantity use by hundreds of millions of people is meaningful safety information. A plant used this freely for this long, including by children and in pregnancy, without a folk tradition of caution attached to it, is very unlikely to be acutely harmful in culinary amounts. That is what the traditional record actually establishes. It establishes nothing about efficacy.

Regional Traditional Uses, Region by Region

Every use below is traditional use only unless separately noted. None has been tested in a human trial.

Malaysia and Indonesia

• Cooling drink. Leaf decoction (daun pandan, pandan wangi) taken as a mild, refreshing beverage, sometimes described as good for restlessness or as a general tonic.
• Jamu and postpartum practice. Pandan appears in mixed preparations and in postpartum bathing and steaming rituals, generally combined with lemongrass, ginger, turmeric and other aromatics. Its role in these is very plausibly the scent — it is present because it makes a preparation pleasant.
• Hair and scalp use. Leaf infusions occasionally used as a hair rinse. Cosmetic and traditional; unstudied.

Thailand

• Bai toey water as a cooling drink, widely consumed and closer to a beverage than a remedy.
• The root — a separate and more specifically medicinal thread. Thai household medicine attributes diuretic action to the root and uses it for “heat” conditions including diabetes. This is the thread that led to the 1998 laboratory work discussed on the blood-sugar page. Note that the root is not what anybody drinks as tea.

Vietnam

• Lá dứa infusions as an everyday pleasant tea, occasionally in mixed thuốc nam formulas for “cooling.” Vietnamese use is overwhelmingly culinary — the leaf colours and scents chè, bánh da lợn and countless sweets.

The Philippines

• Pandan mabango as a kitchen aromatic and in beverages; occasional folk use in decoctions. Philippine ethnobotanical surveys record Pandanus species in various roles, but the aromatic culinary leaf is documented mainly as a food.

Sri Lanka and southern India

• Rampe as an essential kitchen aromatic, added to rice and curry bases alongside curry leaf and lemongrass. Screwpine species appear in Ayurvedic and Siddha texts, but characteristically the flowering species used for kewra water (P. odorifer) rather than the culinary leaf. Claims sourced from Ayurvedic literature about “ketaki” or screwpine frequently refer to that different plant and different part — a common and consequential citation error.

The Pacific

• A different species altogether. Across Micronesia, Polynesia and Kiribati, Pandanus tectorius (hala) is a genuine staple: the fruit is food, the leaves are the classic weaving material for mats and thatch, and various parts appear in local medicine. Its composition, uses and evidence are separate from pandan leaf. Pacific hala findings are routinely mis-cited as pandan-leaf findings, and they are not transferable.

The Pain, Headache and Arthritis Claims

Search for pandan and you will find pain relief presented as one of its established benefits — usually headache, arthritis, chest pain and “body aches,” sometimes with an unsourced claim that pandan leaves have been “traditionally used as an analgesic.” Here is what actually stands behind that.

The traditional basis is real but slight. There are scattered ethnobotanical records of Pandanus species — not always P. amaryllifolius specifically — in preparations for aches, headache and rheumatic complaints across South and Southeast Asia, generally as part of a mixed formula or as an external application rather than as a single-herb internal remedy. Pandan leaf is also used in warm baths and steam preparations where the target is comfort and relaxation as much as pain.

What there is not:

• No randomised controlled trial of pandan for headache, arthritis, back pain, neuropathic pain, or any other pain condition. Not one.
• No human study of any design measuring a pain outcome with pandan.
• No identified analgesic constituent. No compound in pandan has been characterised as an analgesic with a described mechanism.
• No established dose or preparation for pain use.
• No validated animal analgesia data specific to P. amaryllifolius that has been replicated. Where rodent analgesia or anti-inflammatory screening on Pandanus extracts exists, it is preliminary, small, and frequently on other species in the genus.

Evidence tier: traditional use only, and weakly at that. Nothing here supports using pandan for a pain problem, and it is worth naming the specific harm in doing so: pain has causes. Arthritis pain benefits from diagnosis and from treatments with real evidence; a new headache pattern can need investigation; chest pain in particular is a symptom to take to a clinician, not to a teapot. A leaf infusion with no demonstrated analgesic action is a poor reason to delay any of that.

The honest framing: a warm, fragrant drink or a warm aromatic bath is genuinely comforting, and comfort is not nothing when you hurt. Comfort is also not analgesia, and pandan has not been shown to be an analgesic.

External Application: Poultices, Oils and Baths

External traditional uses of pandan are worth separating out, because they are chemically and practically different from drinking an infusion.

• Aromatic baths and steam. Bundles of pandan added to hot bathing water or to postpartum steam preparations, usually with other aromatics. The mechanism most likely at work is warmth plus pleasant scent. Warm water genuinely eases muscle tension — that is not in doubt — but it is the heat doing the work, not the leaf.
• Crushed-leaf poultices. Recorded occasionally for aches, skin complaints and minor wounds. Preliminary in-vitro antimicrobial activity has been reported for pandan extracts, but no human wound-care evidence exists, and the practical hygiene of a crushed garden leaf on broken skin is a real consideration in the other direction.
• Infused oils. Pandan-infused oils are made domestically, mainly for scent and hair care. Note from the aroma chemistry page that pandan is a poor essential-oil plant: its key aroma compound, 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, is destroyed by the prolonged heat of steam distillation. A cold-infused oil retains more character than a distilled one.
• Scenting and freshening. Bundles in cupboards, cars, drawers and rice bins. This works — it is exactly what a volatile aroma compound does. It is not medicine, and the associated folk claim that pandan repels cockroaches has not been demonstrated.

Evidence tier: traditional use only for all of the above. External pandan use is low-risk, which is a genuine advantage. Nothing about it has been studied in a controlled way.

The Anti-Inflammatory Evidence Such As It Is

“Anti-inflammatory” is the most elastic word in supplement marketing, so it is worth being precise about what exists for pandan.

What exists: pandan leaf contains ordinary plant phenolics — catechin, epicatechin, rutin, kaempferol, naringin, plus gallic, cinnamic and ferulic acids — quantified in the 2013 Malaysian profiling study by Ghasemzadeh and Jaafar in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Compounds of this class show antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity in laboratory assays as a matter of routine. The 2024 Fitoterapia review by Wang and colleagues surveys the reported pharmacological activities of the plant, all of it preclinical.

What that is worth: less than it sounds. Two points settle it.

First, the concentrations are unremarkable. Total phenolics in pandan leaf came out at roughly 5–7 mg per gram of dry weight, and total flavonoids around 1–2 mg/g. Those are low-to-middling figures for a green plant — green tea, clove and rosemary are an order of magnitude higher. Pandan is not a concentrated source of polyphenols, and calling it an anti-inflammatory on the strength of those numbers would be misleading.

Second, an antioxidant result in a test tube is not an anti-inflammatory result in a person. The most convincing antioxidant demonstration for pandan is a food-science one: a 2008 Food Chemistry study by Nor and colleagues showed pandan leaf extracts slowed oil degradation in accelerated-oxidation and repeated deep-frying trials, behaving as a natural alternative to synthetic antioxidants like BHA. That is a genuinely useful result — for cooking oil. It says nothing about oxidative stress inside a human body.

The same 2013 study also ran a cell-viability screen against the MCF-7 breast cancer line and reported 67–78% inhibition depending on growing location. Cell-line screens are a first-pass filter that a very large fraction of plant extracts pass, and only a tiny fraction of those ever lead anywhere. This is not evidence that pandan does anything to cancer, and it should never be presented as such.

Evidence tier: preliminary (in vitro) for the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory chemistry; no human evidence of any kind for an anti-inflammatory clinical effect.

“Calming”, Restlessness and the Aroma Question

Traditional use for restlessness and as a mild calming drink is one of pandan's more plausible claims, and it deserves a careful rather than a dismissive answer.

No sedative constituent has been identified in pandan. No compound with a described mechanism, no receptor target, no animal sedation data that has been replicated. There is no human study of pandan and sleep, anxiety or arousal. As pharmacology, the calming claim is UNKNOWN.

But aroma itself is not nothing. There is a substantial general literature on odour and mood, and pleasant familiar smells measurably affect self-reported mood and, in some studies, physiological arousal markers. Pandan's specific advantage here is associative: for anyone raised in Southeast Asia, the smell of pandan is the smell of home cooking, of childhood, of a grandmother's kitchen. A warm fragrant drink that smells like that will reliably feel comforting.

That is a real effect with a real mechanism — it is just not a pharmacological one, and it is not specific to pandan's chemistry. It would apply equally to any deeply familiar comforting smell. It also does not transfer: pandan will not have the same effect on someone encountering it for the first time.

Evidence tier: traditional use only, with a plausible non-pharmacological explanation (aroma, warmth, association) rather than a chemical one. Worth exactly what it is, which is something.

The Diuretic and “Cooling” Claims

The diuretic claim is pandan's most persistent traditional attribution, and it has an unglamorous likely explanation.

Traditional use is real: Thai practice in particular attributes diuretic action to the plant, principally the root. But no controlled human study of pandan's effect on urine output or on renal sodium handling has been published, so there is nothing to quantify.

The confound is straightforward and probably sufficient. Pandan's diuretic reputation attaches to a preparation that people drink in quantity because it tastes good. Drinking more fluid produces more urine. A palatable herbal tea will appear diuretic without any pharmacological action whatsoever, and this explanation should be preferred until someone runs the study that distinguishes them.

“Cooling” belongs to a traditional humoral framework rather than to physiology, and it is best understood on its own terms. Within Malay, Thai and Vietnamese traditional categories, pandan is a cooling plant, and that classification governs when and with what it is used. It is not a claim about body temperature and should not be translated into one.

Evidence tier: traditional use only; the most likely mechanism is fluid intake rather than pharmacology.

Antimicrobial, Wound and Skin Uses

Antimicrobial activity has been reported for pandan leaf extracts and essential oil in laboratory assays, and is summarised in the 2024 Fitoterapia review. Petri dishes, not patients — and here the gap is especially wide, because almost every plant extract inhibits something on an agar plate at some concentration.

Traditional skin and wound uses are scattered: crushed leaf for minor cuts, infusions as a wash, pandan in bathing preparations for skin comfort. Some traditional use exists for dandruff and scalp complaints.

Evidence tier: preliminary (in vitro) for antimicrobial activity; traditional use only for skin and wound applications; no human data.

One practical caution rather than a claim: infected wounds need proper care. A leaf poultice is not wound management, and pandan is often grown domestically or semi-wild in soil that may carry agricultural residue or contamination. If you use fresh pandan for anything, wash it.

Household and Non-Medicinal Traditional Uses

Worth recording, because they are the uses pandan is genuinely and demonstrably good at, and because they explain a great deal about why the plant is everywhere.

• Air freshening. Bundles in cupboards, taxis, drawers and rice bins. This works and needs no defence — it is a volatile aromatic doing the thing volatile aromatics do.
• Insect deterrence. A widespread folk claim, particularly for cockroaches. Not demonstrated. Treat it as folklore.
• Natural food colouring. The green of pandan juice is chlorophyll, and it is the traditional alternative to synthetic dye in cakes, jellies and layered sweets. Genuinely useful, and worth contrasting with the synthetic dyes in commercial pandan paste.
• Ceremonial and decorative use. Pandan appears in garlands, offerings and floral arrangements across the region, valued purely for scent.
• Weaving and thatch. This is the other species — P. tectorius and relatives, whose long spiny leaves are the classic Pacific and Southeast Asian mat and basket material. Culinary pandan's small soft leaves are unsuitable for it.

Which Part, and Why the Root Keeps Appearing

A recurring problem in writing about pandan's traditional medicine is that the medicinal claims and the culinary material are usually different parts of the plant.

• Leaf — overwhelmingly what is consumed: flavouring, colouring, wrapper, tea. Almost all the modern chemistry is leaf chemistry.
• Root — where the more specifically medicinal traditional claims sit, particularly the Thai diuretic and diabetes thread. It is also the part used in the 1998 study that produced the best-known hypoglycaemic result in the genus. Nobody drinks root tea. When an article cites that finding as support for pandan-leaf tea, it has substituted one part for another.
• Fruit — not applicable to P. amaryllifolius, which is effectively sterile and has never been recorded fruiting in cultivation. Every claim about “pandanus fruit” is about a different species, usually P. tectorius.
• Flower — likewise not applicable. P. amaryllifolius almost never flowers. Kewra water is distilled from the male flowers of P. odorifer, a different plant with a different aroma chemistry driven mainly by 2-phenylethyl methyl ether rather than 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline.

Test any pandan health claim you encounter against those four lines. A surprising proportion collapse immediately, because they turn out to concern a part of the plant that culinary pandan does not have.

How to Read a Thin Traditional Record

Traditional use is genuine information, and this site's position is that it should be documented rather than dismissed. But it answers a narrower question than people usually assume. Traditional use tells you what people did. It does not tell you whether it worked.

Four things a traditional record can legitimately support:

1. Rough safety in the traditional preparation and quantity. Pandan's case is strong here: enormous, casual, multigenerational food-quantity use with no folk tradition of caution.
2. Cultural and culinary significance. Unambiguous for pandan.
3. Hypotheses worth testing. The Thai root-and-diabetes thread genuinely did lead somewhere in the laboratory. That is traditional knowledge doing its proper job — generating a hypothesis.
4. Preparation methods worth respecting. Cooks' rules about bruising, late addition and freezing rather than drying turn out to be exactly what the aroma chemistry predicts.

Four things it cannot support:

1. Efficacy for any condition. Only a controlled trial can address that.
2. Safety of a concentrated modern extract. A capsule is a different exposure from a knotted leaf. Pandan's poorly characterised alkaloids are the concrete reason why — see the safety and unknowns page.
3. A dose. There is no established medicinal dose of pandan for anything.
4. Transfer between species or plant parts. The single most common error in English-language writing about this genus.

Applied to pandan, that framework yields a clear and unembarrassing conclusion: a well-established food plant with excellent traditional safety credentials, a scattered and non-convergent set of household medicinal uses, and essentially no clinical evidence for any of them. That is a legitimate answer. It is not a failure of research, and it does not need padding.

Evidence Tiers for This Page

• Randomised clinical trial evidence: none, for any indication on this page — pain, inflammation, calming, diuresis, skin, wounds.
• Human evidence of any design for these indications: none.
• Preliminary (in vitro): antioxidant activity, including a genuine food-system result in frying oil; antimicrobial activity in laboratory assays; a cell-line cytotoxicity screen that is not cancer evidence.
• Preliminary (animal): scattered rodent work on Pandanus extracts, often not on P. amaryllifolius, unreplicated.
• Traditional use only: cooling drink; restlessness and calming; diuretic (root especially); aromatic baths and postpartum preparations; poultices for aches and minor skin complaints; hair rinse; mixed-formula use.
• Traditional use, well supported by non-medicinal mechanism: air freshening; natural green food colouring; comfort from a warm familiar-smelling drink.
• Folklore, not demonstrated: cockroach and insect repellence.
• UNKNOWN: whether pandan has any analgesic, sedative or diuretic pharmacology at all; any active constituent for these uses; any dose; human pharmacokinetics; safety of concentrated extracts.
• Established safety observation (not efficacy): very large-scale, long-standing, casual culinary use of the leaf without a folk tradition of caution — meaningful reassurance about culinary amounts, and only about culinary amounts.

Key Research Papers

Links are PubMed topic searches rather than fixed records. Named papers have title, journal and year in the text. Several searches below will return few or no results — that absence is the finding, and it is why this section describes bodies of literature rather than listing many individual papers.

1. Wang W and colleagues (2024). “Botany, phytochemistry, pharmacology, and applications of Pandanus amaryllifolius Roxb.: a review,” Fitoterapia. The best single entry point; surveys traditional uses and the preclinical pharmacology, and reports no clinical trials. Search: Pandanus amaryllifolius review
2. Ghasemzadeh A and Jaafar HZE (2013). “Profiling of phenolic compounds and their antioxidant and anticancer activities in pandan (Pandanus amaryllifolius Roxb.) extracts from different locations of Malaysia,” BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Source of the total-phenolic and total-flavonoid figures, and of the MCF-7 cell-line screen. Search: pandan phenolic and antioxidant profiling
3. Nor FM and colleagues (2008). “Antioxidative properties of Pandanus amaryllifolius leaf extracts in accelerated oxidation and deep frying studies,” Food Chemistry. The most convincing antioxidant demonstration — in cooking oil, not in people. Search: pandan leaf antioxidant frying oil stability
4. Peungvicha P and colleagues (1998). “4-Hydroxybenzoic acid: a hypoglycemic constituent of aqueous extract of Pandanus odorus root,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology. The one place the Thai root tradition led to a laboratory result — root, purified compound, normal rats. Search: Pandanus odorus root hypoglycaemic constituent
5. Pandan and analgesia or anti-nociception. Run this search and note how little comes back. That emptiness is the honest answer to the pain claim. Search: Pandanus analgesic / antinociceptive
6. Pandan and anti-inflammatory activity. Preclinical only; no human studies. Search: Pandanus amaryllifolius anti-inflammatory
7. Pandan antimicrobial activity. Laboratory assays on extracts and essential oil. Search: Pandanus amaryllifolius antimicrobial
8. Pandanus alkaloids — pandamarilactones and relatives. A genus-specific alkaloid family of real interest to synthetic chemists and essentially unstudied pharmacologically. The concrete reason concentrated extracts are not equivalent to culinary use. Search: Pandanus alkaloids and pandamarilactones
9. Southeast Asian ethnobotany and medicinal-plant surveys. The regional literature in which pandan's household uses are recorded, usually in passing. Search: Southeast Asian ethnobotanical surveys
10. Malay jamu and traditional postpartum practice. Context for the preparations pandan appears in. Search: jamu and traditional postpartum herbal practice
11. Odour, mood and physiological arousal. The general literature that plausibly explains pandan's “calming” reputation without invoking any pharmacology. Search: odour, mood and arousal in humans
12. Pandanus tectorius — the Pacific species. A separate plant with separate uses and a separate literature, routinely mis-cited as pandan. Search: Pandanus tectorius traditional use
13. Pandanus odorifer and kewra. The South Asian flowering species behind Ayurvedic screwpine references. Search: Pandanus odorifer, kewra and ketaki

External Resources

• PubMed — the database behind the searches above.
• NCCIH — US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; evidence summaries on herbs.
• World Health Organization — traditional medicine programme and global health guidance.
• Plants of the World Online (Kew) — authoritative botanical nomenclature for resolving Pandanus synonyms.
• NCBI Taxonomy — species records for checking which plant a study used.

Connections

• All Herbs
• Pandan (Pandanus amaryllifolius) — the main topic page: identification, species, compounds and cautions.
• Pandan Benefits Deep Dive — the hub for this set of four articles.
• Pandan: Species, Safety and What Is Genuinely Unknown — the alkaloids, the missing toxicology, and why extracts differ from leaves.
• Pandan Blood Sugar Claims Examined — where the Thai root tradition led, and where it stopped.
• Pandan Aroma Chemistry — why cooks' traditional handling rules are chemically correct.
• Lemongrass — pandan's constant companion in jamu, baths and the coconut-milk pot.
• Turmeric — a plant with a dense formal traditional record, for contrast with pandan's thin one.
• Ginger — the same contrast, plus genuine human trial evidence to compare against.
• Galangal — the rhizome of the same regional aromatic tradition.
• Makrut Lime — another aromatic leaf used in both cooking and traditional bathing preparations.
• Curry Leaf — pandan's counterpart in Sri Lankan and South Indian cooking.
• Holy Basil — a plant whose traditional record is formal and codified, which shows what pandan's is missing.
• Food Dyes — what pandan's traditional green colouring is an alternative to.
• Rutin — one of the flavonoids quantified in pandan leaf.
• Ferulic Acid — another phenolic identified in the leaf.

Safety note and disclaimer. Pandan leaf in culinary amounts has a long, broad record of ordinary safe use, including in pregnancy and childhood, across Southeast Asia. That record does not extend to concentrated extracts or supplements, which are unstudied and should be avoided in pregnancy and breastfeeding. Do not swallow the leaf itself — it is tough and fibrous and presents a choking and obstruction risk, particularly to young children. Nothing on this page describes a treatment for pain, inflammation or any other condition. Pain has causes: new or changing pain, joint pain that limits function, and chest pain in particular should be assessed by a clinician rather than self-treated with a herbal infusion. This article is general information for education, not medical advice.

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