Perennial low herbaceous plant. The rhizome is tuberous, weighing up to 60 g, brown on the outside, with numerous thin roots below. The stems are thin, leafless, ending at the top with one leaf or one flower. Stems with flowers are generally longer than stems with basal leaves. The leaves are traditionally wintering, heart-shaped or reniform in shape, with sparse teeth or entire. Flowers solitary, calyx deeply lobed. The fruit is a spherical or ovoid capsule. Blooms in early spring.
It grows wild in forests and damp places in the south and southwest of the former USSR. It is especially common in Georgia (hence its popular name – Georgian dryakva).
Medicinal raw materials are tubers, which look like a flattened cake with small roots at the bottom, they are collected in the fall and stored like horseradish or carrots. For treatment, fresh juice from the tubers is used.
Cyclamen is poisonous to humans, fish and animals, with the exception of pigs. Therefore, the product from the rhizome can only be used externally.
With hemorrhoids and rheumatic tumors, fresh grated cake from the rhizome is applied to sore spots. Undiluted juice is used for snake bites.
Juice is very effective for headaches of a cold nature or as a result of inflammation of the paranasal sinuses (frontal sinusitis and sinusitis). The patient should lie supine in bed. 2 drops of juice are injected into the nostrils with a pipette (it is better to do this under the supervision of a doctor). After 5 minutes, a strong reaction begins: the patient begins to sneeze, cough, while feeling a strong heat in the body, sweats. A thick yellow pus is discharged from the nostrils throughout the day. After that, the patient sleeps soundly for a day and wakes up with good health, appetite appears.