It might or might not be the right plant. It is impossible to say from
your description. It is very odd that a garden centre should be giving
out medical advice though...

The thing is an untidy quick grower and mainly noted in the UK as being
good for amateur cacti and succulent society plant sales because of
public demand for it. A sport with slightly tidier growth is always
possible. If you can flower it then the flowers of aloe vera are yellow
which cuts out a lot of the orange and red flowered look alikes.

There is good reason to be wary of using randomly chosen aloes. They
belong to the lily family and some people are sensitive to other
chemicals in their sap. Allergies tend to show up on the second
exposure.

Here are a few links to images of the real Aloe vera:

http://plantsdatabase.com/showimage/15930.html
http://www.hear.org/starr/hiplants/i...ml/starr_03052
3_0060_aloe_vera.htm

At our latitude they tend to be leggy and leaves more translucent.


There are a few pictures in the plants database that do look exactly like
mine, particularly one which was apparantly grown without direct sunlight -
just like mine! Doubt if it will flower unless it does get some sun ;-( ! It
"is" confusing though, because even these pictures show remarkably different
aloes - the ones growing in clusters which are usually shown on aloe vera
products, and ones like mine which grown vertically on a stem!