She Han Shi
StarLimonitum (limonite concretion, hydrated ferric oxide)
Traditionally used for
- Digestion
- Menstrual & women's health
- Sleep
- Mood & calm
- Nerves & recovery
- Heart & circulation
☯ TCM Properties
Induces tranquilization, calms fright and relieves convulsion; Stops bleeding; Alleviates pain
Traditional Chinese Uses
She Han Shi ("snake-containing stone") is a mineral substance — rounded limonite (hydrated ferric oxide) nodules formed around a weathered pyrite core, showing concentric brown-and-yellow rings in section. Sweet and cold, entering the Liver and Pericardium channels, this heavy substance settles and anchors: it calms the Spirit, quiets fright and stops convulsions, and it also stops bleeding and relieves pain. Its weight sedates ascendant Liver Yang and Heart Fire that disturb the Shen.
Traditionally it is used for fright palpitations, restlessness, insomnia and childhood fright-wind with convulsions and spasms, and for bleeding such as uterine bleeding, sometimes with abdominal pain. As with other heavy minerals it is crushed and decocted first (long) to release its actions, usually around 9-15 g, and reduced or avoided in weak or deficient patients because its cold, sinking nature can injure Stomach Qi.
Relationships
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Botanical Description
She Han Shi (“snake-sweat stone”) is a Pinyin name appearing only sporadically in regional Chinese materia medica and folk pharmacopeias and cannot be securely matched to a single mineral, plant, or animal substance in standard authorities such as the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, Bensky & Gamble, or Zhong Yao Da Ci Dian. The literal sense suggests a mineral concretion, but the identification is uncertain and may be conflated with similarly named earth or stone substances in local traditions. Without a verified source material, no morphological description, composition, or preparation can be reliably offered. Practitioners encountering this name should consult the original regional source and, where possible, voucher specimens before any clinical interpretation. Treat as unidentified pending confirmation.
Active Constituents
The name Limonitum belongs to a different drug
Nomenclature and substitution status (not a chemical constituent)Concentration: This record carries two Latin names that denote two different Chinese drugs.
Flagged before anything else, because the pinyin and the Latin name in this record disagree. She Han Shi is Pyritum Rotundum, the round pyrite: a nodule of pyrite or marcasite, usually wholly or partly weathered to limonite, sweet and cold, entering the Pericardium and Liver, used to settle fright, calm the spirit, stop bleeding and relieve pain. Limonitum in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China is Yu Yu Liang, a bedded limonite of quite different habit — layered slabs 5 to 10 cm long, mainly basic iron oxide FeO(OH) with abundant phosphate, sweet and astringent and slightly cold, entering the Stomach and Large Intestine, used to astringe the intestines against chronic diarrhoea and dysentery and to stop bleeding. They are both iron minerals, they share the mineral term limonite, and they are not the same drug. Every published study indexed under Limonitum that appears below is a study of Yu Yu Liang, and is labelled as such.
Pyrite and marcasite (FeS2)
Sulfide minerals; cubic pyrite and orthorhombic marcasite, both iron disulfideConcentration: Variable, from the whole nodule to a residual unweathered core. Chinese sources define the drug as a nodule of pyrite or marcasite, or a limonitised pyrite nodule, with the sulfide portion mainly FeS2.
This is what makes the drug a hazard rather than an inert lump of rust. Pyrite is the standard host mineral for arsenic, cobalt, nickel, selenium, thallium and gold in sedimentary and hydrothermal settings, and the sulfide portion is where any of these sit. Pyrite is also unstable in air and moisture, oxidising to iron sulfate and sulfuric acid, which is exactly why these nodules limonitise — so a given batch's sulfide-to-oxide ratio depends on how long and how wet its history was, and cannot be inferred from the name.
Limonite (goethite, FeO(OH), and hydrated ferric oxide Fe2O3·nH2O)
Iron oxide-hydroxide weathering productConcentration: Bulk of a fully weathered nodule. Chinese sources describe the composition as hydrated ferric oxide of no fixed water content and generally impure.
Poorly soluble at intestinal pH and only partly attacked by gastric acid, so the iron delivered from this drug is far less bioavailable than from a ferrous salt. Nobody has measured how much iron a therapeutic dose actually delivers, so the iron-mediated interactions below are graded on mechanism rather than on measured exposure. The rusty rind is also what makes the drug look inert, which is the misleading part: the oxide is the safe fraction and it is not the whole nodule.
Arsenic (arsenian pyrite)
Metalloid substituted into the pyrite lattice, at tetrahedral sulfur sites as As(-I) and at octahedral iron sites as As(II) and As(III)Concentration: Not measured in this drug. Arsenic-bearing pyrite occurs across a wide variety of sedimentary environments and pyrite is described as a major sink for the metalloid; in gold-system pyrites arsenic partitions in strongly enough to reach percent levels. No published assay of commercial She Han Shi reports its arsenic content.
This is the trace load that matters, and it is unquantified. Arsenic in pyrite is not a contaminant introduced by handling but a structural component of the mineral, so it cannot be washed or picked out. Traditional processing makes it worse rather than better in one specific respect: the drug is calcined to red heat in an open iron pot and quenched in vinegar, and roasting arsenian sulfide ore is the classical route to arsenic trioxide, which is volatile at those temperatures. That is metallurgical chemistry rather than a measurement on this drug, and it cuts both ways — volatilised arsenic leaves the mineral, but it does so into the room, and what condenses back onto the cooling drug is a more soluble arsenic species than the one that was locked in the lattice. Absence of an assay is not evidence of absence.
Cobalt, nickel, selenium and thallium
Trace metals and metalloids incorporated in pyriteConcentration: Not measured in this drug; named in the mineralogical literature as elements pyrite is well known to incorporate.
Recorded because they travel with arsenic in the same lattice and none of them is assayed. Thallium in particular is acutely toxic at low dose and is a recognised trace constituent of sulfide ores. The point is not that any given nodule carries a dangerous amount — it is that nothing in the supply chain would detect it if one did.
Sand, clay, manganese, phosphorus, calcium and vanadium
Gangue and minor substituting elementsConcentration: Variable and unspecified; the standard materia medica composition note describes the drug as largely impure, of no fixed water content, and commonly carrying sand, clay, manganese, phosphorus, calcium and vanadium.
Mostly inert filler. Its practical consequence is that the iron content of a gram of drug is not a fixed quantity, which is one reason no dose-response for this material exists.
Regulatory limits on arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury
Quality-control status (not a chemical constituent)Concentration: None. She Han Shi has no monograph in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China; it exists in provincial materia medica standards. There is therefore no national identity test, no assay, and no arsenic, lead, cadmium or mercury limit.
Of the five minerals in this batch this is the gap with the worst risk-to-oversight ratio. ChP 2020 replaced the blanket heavy-metals provision with element limits written into the monographs of a named list of medicinal materials — a list of plant drugs — and it supplies the general methods (2321 for lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury and copper; 0822 for arsenic) that could be applied to anything. None of that reaches a drug with no monograph. So the one mineral in this set whose parent mineral is a textbook arsenic host is also the one with no arsenic specification anywhere in the national standard. If this drug is used at all, an arsenic assay on the actual batch is the minimum, and it has to be requested, because nothing requires it.
⚠ Drug Interactions
Yu Yu Liang (Limonitum) and Zi Ran Tong (Pyritum) dispensed as She Han Shi
She Han Shi sits between two Pharmacopoeial drugs it can be confused with in both directions. Yu Yu Liang is the drug that officially carries the Latin name Limonitum, and the confusion is built into this record's own naming; it is a layered limonite for chronic diarrhoea and bleeding, not a spirit-calming drug, so a substitution gives the patient an astringent where an anticonvulsant sedative was intended. Zi Ran Tong is Pyritum, pyrite proper, used for fractures and trauma; She Han Shi is a pyrite nodule, so the two overlap mineralogically and a supplier can supply either against a request that names the mineral rather than the drug. The three also differ in oversight: Yu Yu Liang and Zi Ran Tong have national monographs, She Han Shi does not.
Clinical note: Order by drug name and habit, not by mineral. Yu Yu Liang comes as layered slabs whose softer bands can be scratched with a fingernail; She Han Shi is a rounded nodule, often with a rusty rind over a denser core. If what arrives is not a nodule, it is not this drug.
Arsenic-containing drugs and exposures (Xiong Huang / realgar, Pi Shuang, arsenic trioxide therapy, high-arsenic groundwater)
The parent mineral of this drug is a principal natural host of arsenic, and no batch of the drug is assayed for it. A patient receiving arsenic trioxide for acute promyelocytic leukaemia, or taking a realgar-containing patent medicine, or drinking from an arsenic-affected groundwater source, has an arsenic burden that someone is trying to account for; adding an unmeasured mineral arsenic source to that budget corrupts the accounting and adds to the total. The exposure is graded Possible rather than Established because the arsenic content of the drug has not been measured, not because there is evidence it is low.
Clinical note: Do not combine with realgar-containing preparations or with arsenic trioxide therapy. In a patient on arsenic trioxide, an unexplained rise in urinary or blood arsenic should prompt a review of every mineral drug in the formula, not just the obvious ones.
Oral tetracyclines, fluoroquinolones, levothyroxine, levodopa and oral bisphosphonates
Iron chelates all of these in the gut lumen and reduces their absorption — the effect was first characterised for tetracyclines, where Neuvonen and colleagues showed iron salts substantially impair absorption in man. The qualification specific to this drug is that limonite and pyrite are far less soluble than the ferrous salts in those studies, so the free iron available to chelate is much smaller and probably much smaller again than a supplement dose. Graded Probable on that basis: the mechanism is certain, the exposure is not.
Clinical note: Separate doses by two hours, which costs nothing and removes the question. Do not assume the mineral is inert simply because it is insoluble in water — gastric acid attacks it.
Iron overload states and iron chelation therapy (hereditary haemochromatosis, transfusion dependence, deferasirox, deferoxamine)
In hereditary haemochromatosis and transfusional iron overload, hepcidin regulation is lost or overwhelmed and dietary iron absorption is inappropriately high, so any additional oral iron adds to a burden that chelation therapy is working to reduce. How much iron a dose of this drug delivers is unknown, which is why this is Theoretical: the direction is not in doubt and the magnitude is unmeasured.
Clinical note: Avoid in known iron overload and in patients on chelation therapy. Elsewhere the iron content is not the reason to be cautious about this drug — the arsenic is.
Evidence Tier
Strong evidence · 5 studiesRecorded studies by study design, strongest design at the top. This is a study-design tier only, not a GRADE rating: it does not weigh risk of bias, consistency or precision.
Systematic review / meta-analysis
2
2 verified · 0 unverified
Show 2 studies
Randomized controlled trial
0
Other clinical trial
0
Observational / case report
0
In vitro / animal
3
2 verified · 1 unverified
Other / unclassified
0
Verified: design read from PubMed for a DOI that resolves to the cited paper Unverified: taken from the study's recorded description
Clinical Studies
Limonitum Ameliorates Castor Oil-Induced Diarrhoea in Mice by Modulating Gut Microbiota
Castor-oil-induced diarrhoea model in mice treated with Limonitum decoction. Treatment improved time to first defecation, diarrhoea stool rate, degree and score of diarrhoea, intestinal propulsive rate and weight of intestinal contents; 16S rRNA sequencing showed gut microbiota diversity and relative abundance restored toward normal, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry showed recovery of short-chain fatty acids including acetic, propionic, isobutyric, butyric and valeric acids. This studied Yu Yu Liang, the drug that officially carries the Latin name Limonitum, not She Han Shi — the antidiarrhoeal action tested is Yu Yu Liang's indication, not this drug's. Included to make that distinction explicit rather than to support this drug.
[Mineral composition analysis and hemostatic effect of limonitum with different mineral genesis].
Chinese-language study pairing mineralogy with haemostatic pharmacology. Limonitum of two different mineral geneses, leaching type and sediment type, was characterised by polarised light microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and tested as decoction, powder and drug residue in warfarin-treated mice (tail-cut bleeding time, slide clotting time) and in rats dosed for 15 days (recalcification time, plasma viscosity, platelet adhesion and aggregation). Both decoction types shortened bleeding time significantly versus model (p less than 0.01) and several preparations shortened clotting time and reduced plasma viscosity, but the platelet results went in opposite directions for the two geneses — leaching-type decoction reduced platelet adhesion while sediment-type decoction increased it. The drug studied is Yu Yu Liang, not She Han Shi. The finding worth carrying across is the one about genesis: two samples of the same nominal mineral drug, differing only in how the deposit formed, produced opposite platelet effects.
[Mineralogical studies on iron-containing mineral medicines, Haematitum and Limonitum].
Comparative mineralogy of the two iron mineral drugs that do have monographs in the 2020 Chinese Pharmacopoeia, by scanning electron microscopy, surface area and porosity analysis, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and automated mineral identification. Haematitum had an angular surface and a specific surface area of 17.04 m2/g with iron split 44.5 percent Fe(II) and 55.5 percent Fe(III) across 17 minerals; Limonitum had a smooth surface with bundled acicular crystals, a specific surface area of 46.29 m2/g, and iron 14.5 percent Fe(II) and 85.5 percent Fe(III) across 19 minerals. Thirty-one and thirty-two distinct minerals were detected respectively, containing 18 and 17 elements. The authors attribute Limonitum's antidiarrhoeal action to its large surface area and adsorptive capacity and its haemostatic action to Fe2O3 and illite. Again this is Yu Yu Liang, not She Han Shi, and the result that transfers is methodological: a mineral drug is a rock containing thirty-odd minerals and nearly twenty elements, not a single compound.
Therapeutic Efficacy of Chinese Patent Medicine Containing Pyrite for Fractures: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials of Chinese patent medicines containing pyrite for fractures, searching seven databases to December 2022 on the terms pyrite, pyritum and zirantong and yielding 29 clinical studies. Pyrite-containing medicine outperformed control on total effective rate, callus growth, bone union and time to resolution of oedema (all p less than 0.00001), on pain intensity and time to pain resolution (both p less than 0.01), and on erythrocyte sedimentation rate, haematocrit, erythrocyte aggregation and plasma viscosity; heterogeneity was high (I2 above 50 percent) in most comparisons. The drug studied is Zi Ran Tong (Pyritum), not She Han Shi, and the indication is fracture rather than fright or bleeding. It is included because it is the nearest thing to clinical evidence for a pyrite mineral drug, and because the high heterogeneity is itself informative about the state of that evidence.
Clinical use and efficacy of Chinese patent medicines for external use containing pyritum, a mineral medicine mainly used for oral administration: A systematic review
Systematic review of external-use Chinese patent medicines containing pyritum, searching CNKI, Wanfang, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library and PubMed to February 2023 and reviewing 36 studies, 23 randomised trials and 13 case reports, across anorectal, orthopaedic, obstetric and gynaecological and dermatological indications. The authors' stated motivation is directly relevant here: they undertook the review because of growing concern about heavy metal accumulation from oral mineral medicines, and asked whether the external route could deliver the benefit without it. The drug is Pyritum (Zi Ran Tong), not She Han Shi. Note that Wu et al.'s cases of systemic lead, mercury and arsenic poisoning from topical Chinese mineral medicines show the external route is not by itself a safety guarantee, particularly on broken or infected tissue.
Historical Texts
Tang Ben Cao (Xin Xiu Ben Cao, Newly Revised Materia Medica), under the name She Huang (蛇黄)
Tang dynasty, 659 CEBen Cao Gang Mu (Compendium of Materia Medica), Li Shizhen
Ming dynasty, 1596Ben Jing Feng Yuan (Encountering the Sources of the Classic of Materia Medica), Zhang Lu
Qing dynasty, 1695Traditional processing method as recorded in the Zhong Yao Da Ci Dian (Great Dictionary of Chinese Materia Medica)
Modern compilation of classical practiceProvincial materia medica standards of the People's Republic of China, by contrast with the Pharmacopoeia
Modern, late 20th century onwardReferences
- Le Pape P, Blanchard M, Brest J, Boulliard JC, Ikogou M, Stetten L, Wang S, Landrot G, Morin G. Arsenic Incorporation in Pyrite at Ambient Temperature at Both Tetrahedral S–I and Octahedral FeII Sites: Evidence from EXAFS–DFT Analysis . Environmental Science & Technology (2017) [DOI]
- Kusebauch C, Gleeson SA, Oelze M. Coupled partitioning of Au and As into pyrite controls formation of giant Au deposits . Science Advances (2019) [DOI]
- Wu ML, Deng JF, Lin KP, Tsai WJ. Lead, Mercury, and Arsenic Poisoning Due to Topical Use of Traditional Chinese Medicines . The American Journal of Medicine (2013) [DOI]
- Neuvonen PJ, Gothoni G, Hackman R, af Bjorksten K. Interference of Iron with the Absorption of Tetracylines in Man . BMJ (1970) [DOI]
- Inada I, Kiuchi F, Urushihara H. Comparison of Regulations for Arsenic and Heavy Metals in Herbal Medicines Using Pharmacopoeias of Nine Counties/Regions . Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science (2023) [DOI]
- Dai M, Wang D. Mineral medicines of the East: an analysis of records in historical Chinese and Japanese medical texts . Frontiers in Pharmacology (2025) [DOI]
This information is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before using any herbal remedy, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or taking medications.
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