Poison Ivy Cures: What worked and didn’t work. Herbal Tip #8

Hi friends,

This is the final installment of our Poison Ivy saga: a list of ideas to treat it. Thanks for all the suggestions you sent in. We tried most of them! 🙂

Treatments for poison ivy:

1. Avoid and wash if you suspect any exposure at all. This has to come first. Simple water can dissolve the dangerous oils and wash them away, preventing a rash. However, this also means sweat and porous clothing can result in exposure. My husband kneeled down in wet grass with poison ivy. The dampness allowed the oils to get through his pants = rash on his knee. Eek!
2. Calamine lotion: Relatively inexpensive, this traditional standby helped a lot by drying out the rash during the weeping stage and decreased the itch by a medium amount.
3. Hydrocortisone ointment (OTC) – Great for fast itch relief, but wears off quickly.
4. Hot water – My husband used this the most for longer lasting itch relief. The idea is you run hot water over the rash which releases the histamines all at once making it itch a ton, but then giving you itch relief for a few hours. Caution: should be the temperature that would redden your skin like a hot shower, but not hot enough to scald.
5. Technu poison ivy wash. We used this a week into the rash and it was probably too late to help. I expect it would be helpful closer to exposure. Had minimal effect.
6. Fresh Aloe Vera – We should have done this sooner. A thanks to readers Vet and Tom who suggested it! I have a plant in the kitchen window and after putting it on before bed, my husband woke up with all the redness in his forearms gone by morning. It came back later, but this versatile cactus had visible benefits.
7. Rhus Tox Homeopathic remedy (Be Gone Poison Ivy) – We ordered this on Amazon, but by the time we got it, the steroid had calmed things down a lot, so we don’t know how well it would have worked earlier.
8. Zanfel – a cream suggested by Dayna and Gerald as a miracle for relief. We weren’t able to get a tube in time to use, but are keeping it on the list for the future.
9. Oral prednisone – 5 -day course. Despite wanting the non-medical routes to be enough, my husband turned to this short course of steroids to halt the full body inflammation that kept spreading. Thankfully, this stopped the spread and got his body to start healing. The rash wasn’t gone by the five day mark, but it was healing instead of spreading angrily.
10. Prescription steroid cream. This was a nice stop-gap measure as new patches kept showing up, allowing spot treatment instead of needing to hit the entire body with an oral medication.

This is a couple of weeks into the poison ivy adventure:

And here is the 3 1/2 week mark after a 5-day course of prednisone steroids.

And today at almost seven weeks, he has just a little bit of redness left in a few areas, plus an occasional new sore from continuing to do yard work, despite being super cautious and washing immediately when he gets near the weed of death.

Thank you sooo much for all your suggestions and hopefully these tips can help someone else out there.

All the best and thanks so much for your support!

— Misty 🙂