Honey on open wounds - gotta remember that! - and
Jewelweed!
Happily, we have that in our timber, along with the highly toxic (to me) poison ivy. I native plant, yes, and birds love it, but I hate-hate-hate it. Last year I attended a funeral with Poison Ivy face, weeping with the zombie stuff, and I thought what a Halloween costume it would be, if anyone were crazy enough to seek out poison ivy to play an authentic looking zombie. If I had SEEN the stuff, I'd have avoided it. I suspect the face full of ooze was courtesy of the dogs. That'll teach me to stop hugging them. THANK YOU for this post and all the other naturopathic blog entries you share!
Poison ivy face! That's a humorous way to describe a horrible thing. I have a poison ivy face vision of you that I will never be able to unsee now.
I don't seem to get it from my animals. I can not explain that. If I unknowingly get the tiniest exposure directly (once through a small hole in my pants at the knee), it is all over me a few days later. Lavender essential oil seems to be very helpful when I do get it.
Raw honey works better than anything else for wounds. I've used it on a dog that had a wound that would not heal. I know a diabetic who healed a wound that would not respond to anything else. The first time I tried it was out of desperation - it was to be my final attempt before I put antibiotics in my mouth to heal a wound on the bottom of my foot which just seemed WRONG. Just put a small dab of raw honey on a bandaid, enough to fill any gaps if it's deep. You don't need a lot. Switch it up every 4 hours or so and you will be amazed.
I wrote so many of these (four) because I was entering a contest by @naturalmedicine, go check out the other entries, there are many and they are all great. There's only so much writing I can do so I dropped out of freewriting for that week. Now I feel like I've lost my freewriter's touch, every word comes so labored, and I spend a long time after the five minutes trying to make some sense without changing what I said.