Need a free poison ivy cure?

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I've been allergic to poison ivy and poison oak all my life. As you know if you've ever had it, this can be pure misery. But there is a weed that practically everyone, at least in the Midwest, has in their yards, gardens, driveways and along road ditches that is the best antidote possible if you catch the poison ivy soon enough. The weed is Plantain. It grows low to the ground and is hard to kill.

If you think you've been in poison ivy, pull some leave off the Plantain plant, pinch it with your fingernail to break it, and rub the leaf vigorously on your skin until the juice covers the suspected place. If you don't know you've been in ivy, and begin to itch later, bathe with regular bath soap, then rub the leaf, or leaves, on the skin. You won't think it's working, but it will stop the itching. Keep rubbing the leaves on your skin very hard every time you want to scratch. If you keep using this diligently, it will dry the blisters. It's better than having to take prednisone, and much, much better than calimine lotion. The trick is to catch it early and use the plant often. I keep leaves in the refrigerator in a baggy all summer long.

Fire wood often has poison ivy growing on it and you can get it that way without ever actually being in the ivy itself.

-- gilda (jess@listbot.com), June 09, 1999

Answers

Good info Gilda,

I got poison Ivy once from firewood...it was really bad...so watch those dried up vines attached to wood.

-- Moore Dinty moore (not@thistime.com), June 09, 1999.


I have been subject to ANNUAL

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), June 09, 1999.

I have been subject to ANNUAL poison ivy attacks. I even get it from petting the dogs who have been to the creek area. Calamine lotion does NOTHING for me. What does help is Benedryl(sp) cream, the 2% type. This is the ONLY THING THAT HAS WORKED FOR ME IN THE PAST TEN YEARS. Read the label....the ingredients are the important thing and the generic brand is just as good as the benedryl.

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), June 09, 1999.

Thanks for the tip Gilda. I have found that the Atlantic Ocean water will dry it up in several hours also.

-- KoFE (Your@town.USA), June 09, 1999.

Am I a crude hate-monger if I admit I wish all the poison ivy and oak would just go someplace else and quietly die......

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), June 10, 1999.


And take Kudzu with it!

-- Dian (bdp@accessunited.com), June 10, 1999.

I believe Jew elweed can be used to reduce poison ivy and nettle reactions. Crush the leaves and apply as a poultice. See also Wetlan d Plants.

I once had a very uncomfortable and intractable bite from a brown recluse spider. It seemed at first to be only a heavy duty mosquito bite, but the nest day it had turned into a small and growing blister which itched severely. Like a dolt I scratched it without thinking, the blister broke, and wherever the serum inside the blister touched my skin, another such blister developed. I tried Vitamin C. Vitamin E, nothing helped. It was late fall but I finally found one of the last jewelweed plants in the neighborhood. A poultice of crushed jewelweed leaves dried up the blisters overnight and they began to heal.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), June 10, 1999.


NOW you tell me, after I've weeded the loose brick patio where plantain grows like a, um, weed. If you've just done something similar and have to wait for a new batch to come up, you can always try Ivarest, which does a fairly good job on me. I don't think we have jewelweed but I'll ask the guy across the street, who's an older git than this

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), June 10, 1999.

Jewelweed is a wetland plant. It has noticeably fleshy stems. I had understood the juice from the stems to be effective, but I haven't had any luck so far. I'll have to try the leaf poulstice. Gilda, does it matter what kind of plaintain (and in a pinch, do you think hosta would work??). Not having found any nature remedies yet that have worked for me, I consider my tube of topical corticosteroid to be one of my most precious possessions.

I have seen numerous suggestions in the past for how to treat or clean yourself if you think you have been in poison ivy, but of course the problem is usually that you did not know, or don't know what parts of your body were infected. I wish there were something comparable to a geiger counter for this!

-- Brooks (brooksbie@hotmail.com), June 10, 1999.


The best commercial medicine for poison ivy or oak is called Tec-Nu. Really works. Ask your pharmacist for it.

-- Carol (glear@usa.net), June 11, 1999.


Thanks, Carol, I was just about to suggest that. It's an OTC product in southern Oregon. I saw it at WalMart. Loggers and telephone line workers swear by it.

-- LP (soldog@hotmail.com), June 11, 1999.

Sunset magazine--available in the west--had a good article in July a couple of years back. They stated that the best thing to put on your skin once exposed to poison oak/ivy is isopropyl or rubbing alcohol. It breaks up the urushiol [sp?] oil that causes the rash. Little individually wrapped alcohol wipes are cheap in the pharmacy now, folks--might want to stock up, just in case. It also said that if you've had a bad case in the past, the current assault can spread to those areas, even if you didn't contact them with the recent exposure.

The natives here used to have the theory if there was a toxic plant, its antedote grew nearby. Of course, they also used to make temporary tattoos from the poison oak!

TRIVIA: Did you realize poison oak, ivy, & sumac are all related to the cashew nut? We never see the cashew nut in its toxic shell & they are always roasted before we consume them. There were stories from the war about our soldiers in the east contracting rashes from the toilet seats that were lacquered with the juices from a relative plant. For bad cases, cortisone seems to be a miracle remedy.

-- flora (***@__._), June 11, 1999.


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