Boswellia: The Inflammation Pathway Your Painkiller Doesn’t Touch

You take more ibuprofen than you’d like to. Most people with aching knees do, and most of them carry the same low-grade unease about it. Maybe your doctor has mentioned your stomach, or your blood pressure. Or maybe you’ve read enough on your own to be wary of taking something daily for the next twenty years. Those drugs work well on one kind of inflammation, and they were never built to touch the other kind. Your body has two separate assembly lines for inflammatory signals, and the entire category of common anti-inflammatories works on one line while the other runs at full speed. Boswellia works on the line they miss. That’s why it adds something rather than duplicating what you’re already doing, and it’s why an independent group comparing seven joint supplements put it at the top. What It Is Boswellia serrata is the resin of a tree that grows in the dry hills of India, and you already know its cousins. This is frankincense: the same family of aromatic resins traded across the ancient world and burned in temples for three thousand years. In Ayurvedic medicine the resin is called salai guggul, and it’s been used for swollen, painful joints for centuries. That history doesn’t prove...