Physicochemical Analysis of Medicated Ointment Enriched with Ginger (Zingiber officinale) Oil

Abstract

Zingiber officinale rhizome has been revered as a culinary and medicinal spice in many traditional cultures. The essential oil from this plant has been proven to cure diseases of fighting infections by decreasing cholesterol and enhancing weight loss. Therefore, the benefits of this plant must be fully utilised either using raw or ginger based-products. Thus, this study aims to formulate herbal ointments with different concentration of ginger oil as well as to investigate the effect of varying concentration of oil on the ointment properties. In this work, five different ointment formulations were evaluated with various ratios of ginger to virgin coconut oil. All formulated semi-solid ointments were tested for physicochemical properties including hardness, viscosity, pH and turbidity. In this study, the properties of the developed ointment were compared with the commercial product as a benchmark. The developed ointment showed a good result of pH values where all ointments are ranging from 6.03 to 6.19. The ratio of 5:95 of ginger to virgin coconut oil was the best formulation where the tested properties were almost similar to the commercial ointment. Accordingly, the developed ointment in this study can be considered as suitable to be used to the external human body such as chest and nose to heal and protect the respiratory problems.