Brush your fingers against a pot of rosemary on the windowsill, and its strong scent stays on your fingertips. Many home cooks snip a sprig to lay over roasting chicken or potatoes and dry the leftover leaves for later. The herb is native to the Mediterranean coast and has long been used for all kinds of pain, from headaches to sore muscles. A 2026 animal study looked at whether rosemary might also help with the pain of fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia, and a Study in Rats
Fibromyalgia causes long-lasting pain all over the body, even when there's no clear injury or inflammation. The brush of a collar or a light touch can hurt, and things that normally hurt feel even worse. Doctors don't think the body's tissues are damaged. Instead, the nervous system that senses and controls pain has become too sensitive. Current medications help only somewhat and can cause side effects, so researchers keep looking for other options.
The researchers gave laboratory rats a drug called reserpine, which lowers levels of chemical messengers in the nervous system and creates a pain state similar to fibromyalgia. Next, they made four extracts from rosemary's leaves and stems and injected them into male and female rats. Two of the extracts collected the oil-soluble compounds: the essential oil and a hexane extract. The other two collected compounds that dissolve in water or alcohol: an ethanol extract and a water extract. For comparison, they used gabapentin, a drug prescribed for nerve pain.
All four extracts made the rats less sensitive to light touch, heat and cold, and painful stimuli. Rats given the ethanol extract showed the biggest drop in pain responses.
The Compounds Behind the Effect
The team chose a key compound from each extract and tested each one on its own. Three of them helped reduce pain responses: hesperidin, which is abundant in citrus peel; caffeic acid, found in many herbs and vegetables; and limonene, which gives citrus fruits their scent. Still, these three compounds didn't explain the extracts' full effect, so other compounds in the extracts probably helped too.
It's also worth asking how strong the evidence is. People have used rosemary for pain for centuries, and a few clinical studies have tested it on other kinds of pain. But this study was done in rats. The extracts weren't given as food; they were injected into the abdomen. The doses went as high as 300 mg per kilogram of body weight, far more than you would get from eating the herb in food. Whether rosemary helps people with fibromyalgia has not yet been confirmed in human studies.
From Pot to Plate
Rosemary is an evergreen shrub that likes full sun and soil that drains well. Soil that stays wet can rot the roots, so water only after the top layer of soil has dried out. The more often you snip it, the more side shoots it grows, and the fuller the plant becomes.
- Tea: Steep a few fresh leaves in 200 ml of hot water for about 5 minutes. This draws out the compounds that dissolve in water. A little dried tangerine peel goes nicely with it.
- Cooking: Chop it finely and sprinkle it over roasted potatoes or chicken, or mix it into bread dough.
- Essential oil: Don't eat or drink it. Use it only for the scent.
If you're pregnant, take medication regularly, or are being treated for pain, talk with your doctor before drinking a lot of rosemary tea or taking it as a supplement. The small amounts used to season food are fine for most people.
Tonight, snip a sprig from your pot and lay it over whatever you're roasting.
Source: Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2026. Pain-relieving effects of rosemary extracts and their bioactive compounds in a rat model of fibromyalgia
