In ancient Vedic books on medicine, there are reports of cardamom being used even earlier than 1000 BC.

Listed by Avicenna in Book V of his Canon of Medicine as an indispensable ingredient in theriac, cardamom was also used as a toothpaste during that period to treat sore throats and persistent coughs, and was used to treat intestinal infections at the Chinese imperial court. And although the Greek physician Dioscorides listed this spice among the medications in his Materia Medica in 65 BC, he warned his contemporaries that its smell was so powerful "that a pregnant woman need only breathe it in to kill the child she was carrying."

The Romans used cardamom to combat stomach aches after their feasts. In the 13th century, in the northern Alps, cardamom was the accepted medical treatment for combating various digestive ailments, a use reiterated in 1588 by the German botanist Jakob Theodor Tabernaemontanus in his book on spices, Neuw Kreuterbach, in which he vaunted the powers of ground cardamom taken in honey.

To today…

Cardamom seeds are simply chewed or ground and mixed into everyday food.

Antacid