Tradition Chinese medicine utilizes this herb for night sweats, deficiency of chi (eg, fatigue, weakness and loss of appetite), and diarrhoea up to 5000 years ago.

Astragalus was known in the time of first century Greek physician Dioscorides, and the word itself is even more ancient, deriving from a Greek word meaning “anklebone”. Ankle bones were once used as a form of dice, and one conjecture is that astragalus so named because the rattling seedpods sounded like rolling dice.