Thursday, September 04, 2008

Treatments for Poison Oak



My husband is currently recovering from a nasty case of poison oak. He got it at the local archery range when he went into the brush looking for his arrows that missed the target. The rash started a few days after the archery outing. At first he thought the itching was caused by a bug bite, but after a few days it turned into a pretty bad, bright red rash. He went to see the doctor who seemed to correctly diagnose it as poison oak, and prescribed a steroid cream. Unfortunately, the cream spread the poison oak oil around on his leg and made the rash spread and turn even more red than it had been.

Tonight I went to the drug store and bought every poison ivy remedy in sight. My husband ended up using something called Tecnu. What he didn't realize until tonight was that he had never really washed off the oil properly after the initial contact, so it just kept spreading around and creating new, little satellite rashes. Poison oak oil doesn't seem to wash off from daily showers, and evidently not even from multiple washings with Palmolive dish washing soap (a home remedy treatment I got off the Internet).

One other product he found that was really helpful was called ProtectX. It came with a first aid kit I bought at Sam's Club. ProtectX came in towelette form and immediately stopped the itching and some of the redness. Unfortunately there were only two towelettes in the kit and we could not find any place else to buy it, online or off. Too bad. It seemed like a great product.

The Tecnu is supposed to actually get the oil off for good. So tonight we rewashed all of his clothes he has worn over the last couple of weeks and he washed his skin everywhere with the Tecnu. He said this made the itching stop, unlike the steroid cream which made the itching worse.

Even though the Tecnu helped, he still ended up getting oral steroids from the doctor. Steroid aren't very alternative health oriented, I know. But in his case the common home treatments, like Calamine lotion and washing with Palmolive just weren't helping him. When I was young I lived near woods and used to get poison plant rashes on a fairly regular basis, but I don't remember them looking anywhere near as bad as the pictures above. We have a friend who isn't allergic at all to poison oak. He can literally rub it on himself with no adverse reaction. My husband must just be one of the people on the opposite, highly sensitive, end of the spectrum.