Jamu

Dating and early evidence

UNESCO's entry for Jamu wellness culture, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2023 on Indonesia's nomination, describes jamu as an herbal medicine tradition practiced in Indonesia since the eighth century. In a 2010 essay, the historian Hans Pols notes that reliefs at the Borobudur temple in Central Java are cited as evidence of long medicinal use of herbs and spices. Neither source sets out the archaeological or textual evidence in detail, so this dating is best read as the nomination's and the tradition's own account.

Pols links the archipelago's position on trading routes to exchanges with Chinese, Arab, Indian Ayurvedic and Greek medicine. He also observes that the jamu industry's promotional material stresses ancient roots and ties to the royal courts of Solo (Surakarta) and Yogyakarta in Central Java, a framing he reports as marketing rather than documents.

Colonial encounters in the Dutch East Indies

According to Pols, Jacobus Bontius, appointed physician in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1619, wrote admiringly of local healers; Carl Waitz argued in 1829 that some European prescriptions could be replaced with Indonesian herbs; and Willem Gerbrand Boorsma, who led a pharmacological laboratory in Buitenzorg (Bogor) from 1892, came to doubt that isolating single active compounds explained jamu. Pols reports that this medical interest fell away after about 1900.

In a 2009 journal article Pols argues that this research depended on mediators, notably Indo-European women who had built up a medical lore with both European and Indigenous elements. A 2025 study in Medicina Historica by Indonesian historians describes colonial physicians treating dukun (local healers) as sources of material while also marginalizing them, and argues that jamu was reclassified from a holistic socio-cosmological practice into a regulated category of native remedies.

Nationalism, independence and industry

Pols writes that by the late 1930s some Indonesian physicians promoted jamu for public health, arguing that hospital-based medicine could not reach the whole population, and that a 1939 conference of the Association of Indonesian Physicians invited traditional healers to demonstrate their practices. He reports that reliance on jamu grew under the Japanese occupation, when imported medicines were scarce, and again after the 1950 transfer of sovereignty because of a shortage of foreign currency.

By 2010, Pols describes jamu reaching people both through women street sellers and through large manufacturers such as Nyonya Meneer, Jago, Air Mancur and Jamu Iboe, sold in shops, pharmacies and upscale malls. From 2010 a government research program known as jamu scientification (saintifikasi jamu) began preclinical and clinical testing of selected formulas, described under Research and Evidence.

The word jamu

Scholarly and official sources use jamu both for Indonesia's herbal medicine tradition and for the remedies it produces. A 2024 Indonesian pharmacy review states that the word comes from the older spelling djamoe, which it explains as joining djampi, healing with medicinal herbs, and oesodo, health, and calls this a Sanskrit origin. The review gives no linguistic source, so the etymology should be checked against Javanese and Old Javanese lexicography before it is relied on.

Jamu gendong and packaged jamu

Jamu gendong names both a drink and a trade. A 2024 study of sellers in West Java describes it as a liquid traditional drink, usually made from fresh ingredients, kept in bottles arranged in a basket that women carry in a cloth around neighborhoods, markets and bus stations. The same study notes that sellers also buy factory-made jamu in sachets from shops, which ties the street trade to manufactured products.

Scientific jamu and wellness culture

Jamu saintifik, or scientific jamu, refers to formulas approved through the government scientification program. A 2024 review lists twelve, aimed at high blood pressure, gout, dyspepsia, osteoarthritis, hemorrhoids, high cholesterol, liver protection, urinary tract stones, diabetes, physical fitness, weight loss and breast milk supply. The approval label reflects a program decision, not an independent assessment of the evidence.

The UNESCO element uses the wider phrase Jamu wellness culture, covering the skills, values and social relationships around jamu rather than particular products. Historians of the colonial period distinguish jamu as remedies from the broader work of dukun, the local healers whose practice colonial writers both drew on and disparaged.

Household and community preparation

UNESCO's description states that most jamu makers are adult women who prepare customized remedies from herbs and spices, often grown themselves. The nomination frames health as a balance of hot and cold elements in the body. Knowledge passes informally within families and among neighbors, some makers are self-taught, and jamu is also taught at universities. The description presents trust and confidentiality between maker and customer as part of the practice. No professional register or training standard for jamu makers was identified in the sources reviewed.

Street sellers of jamu gendong

The West Java study surveyed 51 women from Sukoharjo, Wonogiri and Surakarta in Central Java who had sold jamu gendong for at least two years in Ciamis Regency, many through repeated circular migration. The largest age group was 40 to 49, and one seller had begun at 14. Over 90 percent reported no difficulty obtaining raw materials, which came from traditional markets or local gardens and fields, and just over half prepared jamu with help from relatives.

The authors describe the skill of mixing jamu gendong as inherited cultural knowledge, and note that sellers face robbery and verbal abuse while working in informal jobs that lack security. The study concerns livelihoods; it does not evaluate the health effects of the drinks sold.

Manufactured and clinic-based jamu

Beyond fresh drinks, products sold as jamu appear in the research literature as sachets of powder and as tablets, and sellers buy factory sachets for resale. In the scientification program, formulas are prepared from fixed weights of dried plant material; the osteoarthritis formula, for example, combines seven dried herbs including temulawak (Curcuma xanthorrhiza) and turmeric. Program studies have been run at the Hortus Medicus jamu research house and at traditional medicine clinics in Central Java and Yogyakarta.

Everyday and traditional purposes

UNESCO's description presents jamu as a way to strengthen immunity and maintain wellness across all age groups, rather than only as a treatment for illness. These are the tradition's and the nomination's stated aims, not outcomes that have been tested. Pols notes that manufacturers market jamu through its heritage and court associations.

A small descriptive survey of breastfeeding mothers who used herbs in Jogonalan, Klaten, Central Java, found that daily use of uyub-uyub as a breast milk enhancer dominated, with papaya leaves, turmeric and aromatic ginger also used. Respondents also cited the mother's fitness and the child's health as reasons for use.

Conditions targeted by program formulas

The scientification program attaches specific indications to each approved formula, ranging from hypertension and gout to hemorrhoids and urinary tract stones. A 2024 review by Indonesian pharmacy authors concludes that the twelve formulas are safe and have health benefits; that conclusion rests on the studies summarized under Research and Evidence and should be read with their limits in mind.

Use alongside medical treatment

An analysis of Indonesia's 2010 national basic health survey covered 12,226 adults in high-risk malaria provinces. About one in five used traditional medicine, which the authors say is largely jamu, for malaria symptoms, mostly alongside free antimalarial drugs. People who took traditional medicine daily for general health were more likely to do so (odds ratio 3.75), as were those without a nearby hospital.

Scope of the literature

Jamu is not a single intervention: formulas differ by maker, region and purpose, so a result for one formula cannot be transferred to another or to jamu in general. PubMed searches run for this page, combining jamu with terms for clinical trials, systematic reviews, history and adulteration, returned mostly laboratory, computational and ethnobotanical studies. No systematic review of randomized trials of jamu was found, and no source reviewed assessed the certainty of evidence for any formula.

Studies from the scientification program

The 2024 narrative review gathered 43 articles from 2013 to 2023 through a single search engine. It reports that the osteoarthritis formula reduced pain over 28 days with efficacy comparable to piroxicam, that an antihypertensive formula lowered blood pressure comparably to captopril, and to hydrochlorothiazide in grade I hypertension, and that a liver formula lowered liver enzymes similarly to silymarin in a 2015 clinic study.

The review does not assess risk of bias, and for most studies it does not report randomization, blinding, sample size or the margin used to judge comparability, and several cited studies are institutional reports. Statements that a formula is comparable to a drug therefore cannot be taken as showing equivalence. Some formulas, such as one for joint pain, have only animal data.

A randomized galactagogue trial

An open-label randomized trial at the Hortus Medicus research house and 30 subsites in Central Java and Yogyakarta enrolled 120 breastfeeding mothers from July to November 2018. It compared a polyherbal decoction of katuk, torbangun and papaya leaves with commercial capsules containing katuk extract for 28 days.

Breast milk volume and infant weight rose in both groups and prolactin fell in both, with no significant difference between them. Because there was no placebo or no-treatment group and participants knew their allocation, the trial cannot show that either product caused the increases. The authors conclude the two had equal efficacy and safety.

Undeclared pharmaceutical drugs

A 2021 toxicology review of case reports concludes that adulteration of jamu with active pharmaceutical ingredients presents important hazards through overdosing, including liver damage, kidney impairment or failure, and steroid dependence. Analysis of one traditional Indonesian product in Singapore found 43 mg of the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone and some caffeine in each sachet.

Case reports describe serious harm. In Singapore, three people developed moderately severe drug eruptions in 1985 after taking tablets sold as jamu for backache in Malaysia, later found to contain phenylbutazone and diazepam; local records from 1974 to 1984 listed eight more cases linked to related drugs, and all four people with toxic epidermal necrolysis died. A 2009 report describes necrotizing fasciitis with severe neutropenia and sepsis after a jamu product found to contain phenylbutazone and dipyrone.

Plant constituents of concern

Apart from added drugs, some botanical ingredients raise concern. A 2018 study found genotoxic and carcinogenic alkenylbenzenes, mostly methyleugenol, in 23 of 25 jamu samples. Margins of exposure were generally below 10,000 for daily lifetime use, which the authors treat as a priority for risk management, while a single two-week course was not judged a concern. The 2021 review calls for specifications on constituents of health concern.

Pregnancy, breastfeeding and side effects

A 2021 comparative review compiled herbs in traditional Chinese and traditional Indonesian medicine that official reports advise avoiding in pregnancy and after birth. In the galactagogue trial, about 3 to 5 percent of mothers had raised liver enzymes or nausea, and no infant side effects were recorded. In the Klaten survey, three respondents (6.7 percent) reported nausea and dizziness. These figures come from small studies and do not establish how often side effects occur.

Delayed care and medical treatment

The malaria survey authors recommend that everyone providing malaria care in Indonesia ask patients about traditional medicine use, since many take it for symptoms of a serious infection. The sources reviewed contain no studies of interactions between jamu and prescribed medicines. Jamu is not a substitute for assessment or treatment of conditions such as malaria, high blood pressure or diabetes, and use in pregnancy, while breastfeeding or with regular medicines is a matter to discuss with a health professional.