A thorny shrub or small tree of the buckthorn family with a twisted trunk and thin curving branches. Flowers small, greenish. The fruits are yellow-red, edible. It occurs in dense thickets in Central Asia, sometimes in Transcaucasia.
Medicinal raw materials are fruits and sometimes leaves.
In folk medicine, the fruits of jujube are used for catarrh of the lungs. The leaves have a persistent anesthetic effect. If you take 1-2 leaves and chew them, then after that neither the sweet taste of sugar nor the bitter taste of quinine are felt. The anesthetic effect lasts from 5 to 10 minutes. The content of the anesthetic substance in the leaves reaches 1.7%.