★★★★★
Even f the rash is old, swollen n leaking fluid, comfrey is probably the only medicinal herb that immediately stops the itching n starts the healing. Personal experience. It is truly better than the expensive otc junk, hot showers - which seems to aid in spreading the itchy oils systemically, and the other stuff I've tried which seem useless after the initial set in stage.
EC: Hi Louis,
We presume you mean comfrey for a oison ivy rash? If not, please reply so we can put your feedback on the correct page. Thanks!
Hot Water
★★★★★
Salt
★★★★★
My husband got into some poison ivy while cleaning out weeds on a cyclone fence and was covered with poison ivy. He came home in pain and itching very badly. I was told about the remedy and tried it on him. I had him to wet his arms and then I put table salt on them and he could only take letting it stay on about ten minutes and then washed it off. The salt dried up the bumps and calmed the itch and within a hour, for him, everything had stopped. I put Olive oil on his arms to moisturize his skin because it was very dry and he had no problems with it again. I also treated three boys the same way with the same results.
★★★★★
The relief is immediate and lasts for two to ten hours (depending upon how severe your poison ivy reaction is). Repeat as many times the first day as needed. The second day you won't need many.
By the third day you are almost home. WHY does it work? Heat is a catalyst for ALL biological reactions. Heat speeds up biological reactions. Heat is required for all biological reactions including poison ivy. When you put your hand/arm in ice water (approx. 33 deg F), the ice draws the HEAT out of the area with poison ivy. Essentially, shutting the poison ivy reaction down and giving your skin time to heal. HOW I do it: Just say I have a poison ivy outbreak on my forearm. I take a large ice chest. Fill it with water up to about 4 inches from the top. Then put in a full bag of ice. Maybe two bags. S
wish the ice around with your hand. If all the ice melts, then you should add another bag. When ready, I just submerge my entire forearm into the ice water. I like to leave my arm in the ice water for at least a full minute. Two full minutes is better. I had a friend who once had poison ivy on almost all areas of his body. He took quick baths in the bath tub in ice water. It worked and in 3 days he was done. That's it. Works 100% of the time. William Note that heat is a catalyst for chemical, bacterial, and biological reactions.
I'll skip on the platelets frenzy on two counts. It is rumored that george sorros takes regular blood transfusions from young children or possibly aborted babies so??? As for healthy skin there are a number of good natural ways to achieve. Carnasine is the best. Check out Jon Barron as he's the expert on it as well as many other health & nutrition topics. He has lot's of info and excellent products (Baseline I think). I take Raw Bovine Bone Marrow regularly to keep my blood up. GABA and Ornithine are my favs for boosting HGH/IGF. I recently started D Aspartic Acid for the Testosterone boosting and getting good results. Yes, the very hormones that can take one right outa the sick-bed can immediately place you in the sex-bed, which is another situation that must be under control. But the longevity experts agree that boosting both the HGH & Test. together make for way better results.
My recovery is so difficult that it's always impossible to know the outcome. I have so many major problems and it's way to much suffering for anyone to endure. I take the smart & aggressive method and like Bill Belichick coaching football, identify & correct every mistake big or small.
Clay
Clay
Go try it on your kids (which you definitely do not have, because if you did, you'd never advise anyone else to do this with such naive sureness) but don't tell someone else to do it.
DMSO
Remove Oil with Towels
Today I was making some salves and was having to clean oil out of jars. I used paper towels to get as much oil as possible off of the jars before using soap and water. I realized it was much easier to clean the jars if I used the paper towels. I also realized that when my hands were covered with oil, paper towels got it off much better than hot water and soapy water. Hmmm....
So I think I believe him. Next time we are exposed to poison ivy, I will try it. Maybe it is best to do both. One handy thing is that if you are exposed to poison ivy and are not near soap and water, you may be able to rub the area with your clothes, or an extra towel or garment in your car.
I think regular towels will work as well, but I like to minimize how much oil I am expecting my washing machine to get out of cloth. I have never been quite sure I was getting all of the poison ivy out of the clothes in the washer.
Has anyone else ever heard of this or tried it?
~Mama to Many~
I'm experimenting with what I think is the formula I heard over 50 years ago to make oneself resistant to Poison Ivy.
I heard this from a Cherokee source. I do not know if it is authentic or not as a proven method. I am obviously proceeding with great caution.
First: I have dried PI leaves....about 40 leaves.
Second: I took a pinch of the dried leaf and rubbed in on the inside of my wrist. I washed my hands but left the wrist untouched. If any itching or PI evidence had showed up on my wrist I would have immediately used my anti PI remedies to stop progress. I use Borax to clean the infected area...repeated...then use bentonite clay topically and internally.
If no negative results from the "wrist" sensitivity test emerges...and it did not... I then take a very small amount again...about half the size of my fingernail...and put that in my mouth. I do not swallow. I just let the brief exposure in my mouth stay for less than 10 seconds.
No reaction to that "mouth" test also. So far so good.
Next I will take a whole leaf and put in hot water and steep.
Again, I will first apply the liquid to the wrist.
If no reaction to that will do a "mouth test" using the steeped liquid...about a teaspoon full and spit out after ten seconds. If no reaction to that...
The REAL test begins...and hopefully what will begin the "immunization" test.
WARNING...I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THIS FOR ANYONE. THIS TEST IS ONLY FOR ME. I MAKE NO CLAIM THAT IF IT DOES WORK FOR ME IT MAY NOT WORK FOR SOMEONE ELSE WHO IS MORE SENSITIVE TO POISON IVY THAN ME.
Next: I will drink a teaspoon of the PI tea. This is the beginning of the real test. The idea and theory is that by ingesting a degraded amount of the PI poison the body might build a resistance to the poison.
So....gradually....over the next few months I will drink tiny amounts of the tea to test the theory.
AND THEN...next summer...
You guessed it....I will intentionally expose myself to Poison Ivy.
I fully expect to get the rash....that is, I do not think this experiment will work.
So why am I doing this? Because I am tired of wondering if the old remedy I heard from a Cherokee Indian...55 years ago is a myth.
Thus I am my own test body. Guinea pig.
Stay tuned...I may be reporting back in 9 months just how stupid I am. Note...I will only touch the poison ivy leaf to my hand next summer... and be prepared to immediately act if the rash begins.
★★★★★
He was going to be working outside and didn't want to deal with poultices or salves or anything. I thought about how I used Goldenseal powder to dry out a newborn's umbilical cord. I had some homemade Goldenseal tincture that I had been making. So we put some in a small spray bottle. Because it was an alcohol (vodka) base, it did sting when it hit the broken skin, but that passed quickly. The Goldenseal worked very, very well to dry up the poison ivy! He would reapply every 2-4 hours if he was home.
At night, I used goldenseal root powder, turmeric powder and oregon grape root powder mixed to dry up the "ooze" the first night. I sprinkled it on liberally, covered with a piece of old sheet, and attached the sheet to the arm with an old sock top. In the morning, he rinsed it off and we sprayed on more Goldenseal. He had slept much better.
It took a few days for his arm to heal up, but there were times in the past when his poison ivy took weeks to heal up, so I was pleased.
Internally, I had him taking Vitamin C (1 gram a couple of times a day), nettle leaf capsules and turmeric capsules (8 of each of those a day.)
One of my little boys had a few poison ivy blisters on his foot. The skin was not broken. We tried the goldenseal tincture spray. It did not sting and even after a couple of hours he could see improvement.
Goldenseal is an expensive herb. Supposedly, Oregon Grape Root will work as well, but I haven't tired that yet. I may make some tincture up and try that and see. I am sure I will have more opportunities this summer to try it out!
~Mama to Many~
Stick Deodorant
★★★★★
Oak Bark
I once read a book about a young man that raised Honey bees. This was back when rural areas had few telephones (can't recall the state but I think it was in the Midwest U.S.A.). Probably in the 1920's or 1930's. This family lived in the woods and the boy would explore the area enjoying the outdoors. The boy said that he once got into some poison ivy and was going through misery all over his body! No one could help him so his mother got on a telephone and called his grandmother in another state.
It took hours to get a hold of his grandmother but when the boy's mother finally got the grandmother on the phone the grandmother told the boy's mother to go out into the woods and take an ax and go to an oak tree and cut down a load of OAK BARK! She then told the mother to place the oak bark in a big tub or sink and fill the tub or sink with water covering the oak bark and to boil the oak bark and water. The oak bark was to be taken out of the tub and the boy was to soak in the oak bark hot water (hot to where the boy could stand it) and soak in this solution until the water became cold. Then the boy was to get into his pajamas and go straight to bed and sleep.
The boy claims that when he woke up the next morning the poison ivy irritation was gone! Just thought I would share this story with others. I have the book in storage but with 6 full storage units I will have a hard time finding it. But I think it is a true story.
DMSO
★☆☆☆☆
Milk
★★★★★
One thing I've found that works amazingly well came from the website of a hospital in upstate New York, where it is the only hospital for miles around, and where campers and hikers frequently come into contact with poison ivy. Rather than withholding information in order to get people into the ER, they put this remedy on their website:
Milk. Just soak a cloth with it, and hold it on the area affected. I did this with my 3-year-old, when initially it looked as if someone had slapped her (and I suspected my 8-year-old). There was an area of distinct red with a sharp edge that crossed from her cheek, halfway over her eye, and onto her forehead. But instead of fading, it got worse, to the point when she woke up the next morning that half of her face was swollen and her eye was swollen shut. I knew poison ivy in the eye was dangerous so I was looking for advice online (when to take to the ER, anything we should/shouldn't do in the meantime), and came across the advice to put milk on it.
We had pet milk (milk from a farm, unpasteurized), so that's what I used. I put her in the tub, soaked a washcloth, and held it on her face. When it got warm, I flipped it and added more milk.
Within 15 minutes, I could see a crack of eyeball, and her face was less puffy. Within half an hour, her eye was most of the way open. And within 45 minutes, the redness and swollenness was pretty much gone everywhere on her face, with just one little spot. She was 3 and so done with sitting in the bathtub while I held a washcloth on her face, so I let her out for a bit, and then before bedtime just patted some more milk on the one remaining spot, and after 10 minutes it was no longer red. It took a few days for the blistering to heal, but at that point it wasn't itchy or spreading at all-just damaged skin from her exposure.
My husband, at the same time, started cleaning up the yard (a tornado had deposited shredded poison ivy leaves in our yard) and got a very bad case. He went with over-the-counter remedies for 3 weeks, while it continued to get worse, and then finally caved and tried my "weird" remedy. His was so many places on his body it did take a couple of days to get it all, but it was just a couple of days. Yet the next time he had poison ivy he tried the conventional stuff again and again it was over a week before he'd try milk on it, but now he has learned his lesson and turns to milk right away!
We instantly tried milk on my mom who has a rip-roaring case of PI right now, and it brought almost instant relief. Better than ACV! Hope this helps!!! :)
★★★★★
Cream of Tartar
Grapefruit Seed Extract
★★★★★
Just put 10 drops of GSE in a sprayer bottle and spray on area 2-3x daily, OR, if you don't have a sprayer bottle, you can put 3 drops of GSE in 2-3 oz. of water, dip a cotton ball in it, and just pat it on the area. It works beautifully! I am severely allergic to Poision Ivy -- and have tried just about everything -- even medications that costs $10-12 for a "spray on" remedy, but nothing worked as well as this simple remedy. A 2 oz. bottle of GSE is only $10 at a health food store or on-line, and it works for many, many things -- including candida, which I cured myself of using GSE. Oh! And TRY not to scratch -- that is hard, I know, but it spreads it. Thanks!
★☆☆☆☆
Bee Pollen
★★★★★
About five years ago I read a recommendation that eating honey might keep one from getting poison Ivy. since that time I have started putting a spoon of honey in one of my morning cups of coffee occasionally doing it more often in the likely high out break seasons - spring to mid summer. Although once in the past I did get poison ivy in winter. My own thinking on the subject led me to take some bee pollen pills that I got at thedrug store. These can be over done. When I first stared taking them daily, after a couple of weeks I broke out with a poison ivy type rash all over my body but it went away in a few hours. I encountered a second occurence of this rash when I took the pills daily after a few lay off days. Now I take them occasionally during poison ivy season. Maybe once a week at the start then cut back to one or two more pills over the next few months. This year I only took a couple in the spring and have eaten honey occasionally. I don't know if this has helped me but in the last five years I have not had any severe poison ivy outbreaks. I remember a couple of times having a few itchy bumps on my fingers that went away in a few days. I do not know what they were but when I got them I sure worried that they were poison ivy.
Rubbing Alcohol, L-Lysine
★★★★★
DMSO
★☆☆☆☆
